Intel Slipped to 2031. New Albany Home Prices Didn't Blink. Here's Why

You've been watching the Intel headlines and waiting for the delay to hand you a New Albany discount. Here's the straight answer I give buyers who ask me: it isn't coming. Intel confirmed its New Albany fabs slipped again, to 2030 and 2031, and New Albany's list median is holding around $502,900 anyway, roughly $150,000 above the Central Ohio median of $350,000. The delay is real. The discount is not. Understanding why tells you more about buying in this corridor than any headline will.

Did Intel really delay to 2031?

Yes, and it's worth being precise, because the headlines blur it. Intel now expects the first New Albany fab to finish construction by 2030 and turn operational in 2031. The second plant follows a year behind, operational in 2032.

But read what's happening on the ground before you decide what that means.

• More than $5.2 billion already spent on the site, over $1.5 billion of it in 2025 alone
• More than 9.4 million work hours logged on construction
• The basement level done, with above-ground structural work underway
• $1.5 billion in federal CHIPS money, releasing milestone by milestone as construction gets verified
• $600 million in Ohio state grants committed
• Governor DeWine coming out of meetings with Intel saying the company affirmed its commitment to Ohio

So the honest read is not "Intel is bailing." It's "the largest single semiconductor project in American history is moving slower than the press releases promised." Those are very different things, and the market has priced them very differently.

Why didn't New Albany prices drop?

Because the people buying in New Albany proper were never buying the fab.

Walk Market Square on a Saturday and look at what the price actually buys: a master-planned community with enforced Georgian architecture, 70-plus miles of trails people genuinely use, a wellness campus at the center of town, and a school district rated five stars across the board. That's what the $502,900 median is paying for. It was worth that before Intel announced, and it holds whether the first wafer ships in 2028 or 2031.

Here's the thing I keep drawing on the whiteboard for buyers: this market has lanes. New Albany proper is the lane where demand is anchored by the community itself, so an Intel delay barely registers. The speculation lane is further out, the farmland and new phases toward Johnstown and the Licking County line, where people bought purely on the Intel timeline. That lane feels every headline. If you bought a lot out there in 2022 expecting 2025 paychecks next door, the delay stings. If you bought a home in New Albany for the town, nothing about your Tuesday changed.

Where does the Intel bet actually show up?

Not as a discount. As a floor under the long game.

Think about what $5.2 billion already in the ground means. Nobody walks away from that. The workforce is coming, on a longer clock. Therefore the corridor's 10-to-15-year story is intact, and the buyers who understand that are quietly fine paying today's number for an asset with that kind of tailwind behind it. That's exactly why the median is holding instead of sliding.

What the delay DOES buy you is time. In 2022 you had to outbid the Intel hype. Right now you get to shop the corridor without a feeding frenzy, while roughly 3 in 10 active listings across our core suburbs have been sitting 60-plus days. Some of those sitting listings are in and around this corridor. That, not the headline, is where your leverage lives.

What should a buyer actually do with this?

Stop waiting for the market to blink and start hunting lane by lane. The move is knowing which specific listings have sat, why they sat, and what that seller's clock looks like. A 70-day listing in the Intel corridor will negotiate. A fresh listing in New Albany proper will not. Same zip codes, two different games.

If you're weighing the town itself, start with the New Albany overview and the honest breakdown of what hiring a strong agent looks like there. Then send me your target streets and your budget, and I'll pull what Intel-corridor listings actually did over the last 90 days: which ones sat, which ones sold over ask, and where the negotiating room really is. That pull takes me an evening and it changes offers. Or grab fifteen minutes at calendly.com/adam-geuy and we'll map your lane properly.

Adam Geuy at NextHome Experience. 937-239-2919.

Sources: Manufacturing Dive (Intel timeline, 2030-2031); Ohio.news ($5.26B spent, $1.5B in 2025, $600M state grants); IndustrialSage/NIST (CHIPS Act $1.5B milestone-based funding, 9.4M work hours, largest single semiconductor project in U.S. history); WOSU (DeWine on Intel's affirmed commitment); Columbus REALTORS May 2026 report (Central Ohio $350,000 median); July 2026 portal pull (New Albany list median ~$502,900).