New vs resale around Austin: where new homes cost more per square foot

By Julian Arlo · October 29, 2026

Whether a newly built home costs more per square foot than a resale around Austin depends on which city you are standing in. In Georgetown and Leander, where most of the building is, the two are the same price by the square foot. Inside Austin, a new house costs about twice what a resale does. We set the asking prices stated in 559 video tours of homes in 18 cities of the area — newly built homes and model homes on one side, resales on the other — against the size each tour states. The table below compares the cities with at least two priced tours on either side.

The short version

• Georgetown and Leander: no premium for new. In Georgetown, newly built homes toured run a median of $219 a square foot and resales $222; in Leander, $250 against $251. The new homes are larger — a median of 3,300 square feet in Georgetown against 2,500 for the resales — so they cost more in total ($712k against $521k), but not by the foot.
• Austin: new costs about double. Inside the city, the newly built homes toured run $692 a square foot and the resales $353. The new ones are custom and small-run builds in established neighborhoods such as Allandale and Northwest Hills, with a median asking price of $2.35M; the resales are the older housing stock of the same neighborhoods, median $945k.
• Cedar Park, Kyle, Bastrop, Pflugerville: new costs more, on small samples. The gap runs from about 15% to 40% in these cities, but each side rests on a handful of priced tours, so the table marks them and the figures should be read as a first look. Liberty Hill runs the other way — $207 new against $252 resale — on four resale tours.
• Round Rock is a resale market in the tours. Of its 51 tours, 41 are resales, at a median of $187 a square foot — the lowest of the larger cities. Only one newly built home toured there gives a price and a size, so the new column says little yet.

A newly built home in Georgetown, and two resales inside Austin — one in Quail Creek, near the city's resale median, and one in Travis Heights, where the land sets much of the price:

Why the answer changes from city to city

In Georgetown, Leander and Liberty Hill, almost everything being toured is new: 89 of Georgetown's 117 tours and 54 of Leander's 65 are newly built homes or model homes in master-planned communities such as Wolf Ranch, Parkside on the River and Travisso. The resales toured in those cities are not old houses. In Georgetown the median year built among the 28 resale tours is 2010, and eleven of them were built in 2018 or later, many in the same master-planned communities as the new homes — Wolf Ranch, Sun City; in Leander the median is 2018. A resale there is often a production builder's plan a few years on, on a lot priced the same way, and so the square foot costs about the same whether the house was finished this year or six years ago.

Inside Austin the two columns are two different kinds of house. The resales are the city's existing stock — mostly built before 2000 (the median year is 1997, the oldest toured 1914) in Northwest Hills, Quail Creek, Travis Heights and the like, a median of just under 3,000 square feet. The newly built homes are what goes up on a lot in those same neighborhoods, often where an older house stood: a custom or small-run build of about 3,900 square feet on land whose value is a large part of the price. A new home there is not a newer version of the resale next door; it is a larger house on the same expensive land, and the per-foot figure says so. The first article in this series, what a square foot of new home costs in 25 communities, walks through that central-Austin range community by community.

The smaller suburbs sit between the two. In Cedar Park, Kyle, Bastrop and Pflugerville the newly built homes toured are in new sections — Crestline at Brushy Creek, 6 Creeks, Del Webb Lost Pines — while the resales are older subdivisions elsewhere in the city, and the new homes come out 15–40% higher by the foot. With two to nine priced tours on a side, though, one unusual home moves the median, which is why the table stars those figures.

Every city, new against resale

How to read these numbers

• They are asking prices stated in the tours, not sale prices. A model home often shows a base price for its plan, and the home in the video may carry upgrades that cost more; a resale's asking price may be reduced later.
• “New” is a newly built home or a model home as the video presents it; everything else toured is counted as a resale, including homes only a few years old. Land and farms are left out.
• Square footage is the living area the listing or the video states. Lot size, which drives much of the price inside Austin, is not in the figure — a resale on a quarter acre and a new build on the same lot are compared by their living area alone.
• A median of two or three tours says where a market starts, not what every home costs. Georgetown (68 new, 28 resale priced), Austin (55 and 89) and Leander (42 and 10) are the firmer figures; the table marks a median that rests on fewer than four priced tours.
• The table updates itself as tours are added or taken down; the figures in this text are those of October 29, 2026.

Watch the tours

Each city in the table links to its page of tours, and each count to that market's tours there. To see the two side by side in one place, open new homes in Georgetown and then resales in Georgetown, and watch a few of each.

Figures are asking prices from video tours on LandHomeTours, not appraisals or valuations, and nothing here is advice to buy, sell or make an offer. LandHomeTours is not a real estate brokerage and does not represent buyers or sellers; confirm prices and details with the listing agent or builder.