New Construction in Hilliard, Ohio: Is It Worth It vs Resale?

New construction in Hilliard closed at a median of $620,760 this year. Resale closed at $385,000. That is a 61 percent gap, and if you stop reading here you will walk away believing new construction in Hilliard carries an enormous premium.

It does not. Per square foot, new construction is $226 and resale is $229. New is the cheaper number. The entire gap is size, and I want to walk you through it, because this is the single most misread statistic in this market and it costs people real money in both directions.

Why does new construction look 61 percent more expensive in Hilliard?

Because you are comparing two different products that happen to share a zip code.

The median new construction home closing in Hilliard this year is 2,900 square feet. The median resale is 1,542. That is an 88 percent size difference, which is the largest gap of any town I looked at in Central Ohio.

The reason is in the year built. Hilliard's resale stock has a median year built of 1993. A great deal of what trades hands here is 1990s product built at 1,400 to 1,700 square feet, and it is excellent housing at a real price. Builders are not replacing it. Nobody is putting up 1,542 square foot new homes in Hilliard in 2026, because the land will not support that math. They are building 2,900 square foot houses for somebody else entirely.

So the 61 percent is not a premium. It is two markets sitting in one table.

Hilliard, 2026 closings through August	New construction	Resale
Homes closed	69	449
Median close price	$620,760	$385,000
Median square footage	2,900	1,542
Median price per square foot	$226	$229
Median year built	2026	1993

Source: Columbus MLS closings, January 1 through August 27, 2026, Hilliard mailing address.

What happens when you compare the same size house?

New construction wins, narrowly.

Take the median new construction size, 2,900 square feet. Buy that same house as a resale at Hilliard's resale rate of $229 per foot and you land around $664,100. The actual median new construction close was $620,760. New comes in roughly $43,340 under.

Now the honest caveat, because I would rather you hear it from me than find it out on a Saturday. There is very little 2,900 square foot resale inventory in Hilliard. The comparison is arithmetically correct and practically thin. If you want that much house here, new construction is not just competitive, it is close to the only door.

The reverse is more useful. If you want 1,500 to 1,800 square feet in Hilliard, resale is your only option, and you should stop shopping builders entirely. No one is building that product at that price on this land.

Does days on market tell you whether new construction is worth it?

Not directly, and it is worth being precise about why. Days on market matters for exactly one reason: a fast market means buyers are competing, competition means bidding wars, and bidding wars push the price above what the seller asked. Speed itself is not what you care about. What the speed tells you about competition is.

Which means it cuts one direction only, and the cost lands in the worst possible place, which is your cash. A house lists on Thursday, thirty people walk it over the weekend, and it closes twenty thousand above asking. Your lender does not care that you won. They lend against the appraisal, and the appraisal is coming in near the asking price rather than near your offer. That twenty thousand is not financeable. You write a check for it, on top of your down payment, and it buys you nothing but the win.

A builder is doing the opposite of that on purpose. The price does not move, but the incentive budget is real and it is aimed straight at your cash to close: closing cost credits, prepaids, and a rate buydown. The builders I work with are generally landing buyers near 5.5 percent against roughly 6.7 percent on the open market, but there is no single builder rate: they write FHA and conventional, fixed and adjustable, and the number depends on the product. Three buyers touring the model on Saturday does not push that price up. Wanting it badly costs you nothing extra at the table.

So the useful question is never which side sells faster. It is whether the resale side is competitive enough that you would be handing over cash for the privilege of winning, on top of the house itself.

One measurement warning, because the number gets quoted a lot and it should not be. Builder days on market is not comparable to resale days on market. Builders do not enter listings on a set schedule: some specs go into the MLS before framing, some go in the week they are already sold so the closing records a comp, and plenty sell half built and never sit on the market at all. Across Central Ohio, 28 percent of new construction closings report under 7 days, and the longest reports 1,593 days, a record opened years before the house existed. Compare MLS entry date against sold date and new construction runs 113 days versus a reported 56. Resale days on market measures market time. New construction days on market measures how long a builder left a record open. This post does not treat the two as the same statistic.

Which Hilliard communities have new homes right now?

The live directory for this town, with every community and builder, sits at new construction in Hilliard.

There are 29 homes available across 5 communities, and the spread between them is wide enough that "new construction in Hilliard" means four different budgets.

Community	Builder	Homes available	Median asking
Sugar Farms	Pulte	10	$575,900
Alton Place	American Heritage	8	$864,990
Hill Farm	M/I Homes	7	$522,910
Retreat at Sugar Farms	Pulte	3	$494,900
The Courtyards at Carr Farms	Epcon	1	$644,320

Sugar Farms and Retreat at Sugar Farms are both Pulte and sit roughly $80,000 apart on median asking, which tells you they are different product lines rather than different neighborhoods. Alton Place is the top of the market here and prices like it. The Courtyards at Carr Farms is Epcon, which means low maintenance ranch product with the exterior handled, a different proposition from the rest of the table.

Can you negotiate the price with a builder in Hilliard?

No, and the reason matters more than the answer.

A builder will not cut the sale price, and it is not stubbornness. The recorded price sets the comp for every home behind it in that section. Discount one contract by fifteen thousand and they have repriced the remaining inventory and undercut every buyer who already closed there. Appraisals in that section start coming in against the discount. They hold the number, and they should.

What they will do is hand you value that never touches the recorded price. Closing cost credits. A rate buydown through their preferred lender, which in this market is often worth more than the price cut you were going to argue for. Design center allowances. Structural options included. Occasionally the lot premium disappears.

In a town moving at 7 days, that flexibility is thinner than it is in a slower market. Which is exactly why the question is never "what will you take for it." It is "what are you giving on this home, this month, and will you put it in the contract."

What about the interest rate?

This is the part price per square foot cannot see, and it is often larger than everything above it.

Builders sell through their own lender. M/I has M/I Financial, Pulte has Pulte Mortgage, and most of the national builders here work the same way. That matters because the incentive budget can be spent on the rate instead of the price. They will not cut the sale price, since that resets the comp for the whole section, but buying your rate down costs them the same money and never touches the recorded number.

Most of the builders I talk to regularly are sitting somewhere around 5.5 percent right now. D.R. Horton has been the outlier and runs lower. Resale buyers I am working with are being quoted closer to 6.7 percent, because a private seller has no lender and no budget to buy anything down. That spread moves through the year and it differs by builder, so treat the figures below as the shape of the thing rather than a quote.

Here is what that does to Hilliard, using the medians above, five percent down on both sides, and the tax fully reassessed:

Hilliard, monthly cost to own	New construction	Resale
Loan at 5.5% (new) and 6.7% (resale)	$3,348/mo	$2,360/mo
Property tax	$667/mo	$414/mo
Total	$4,016/mo	$2,774/mo

Hilliard is the town where this does not rescue the comparison, and I would rather say that than sell you something. A rate advantage of a point and change cannot close a $235,000 price gap. It makes the bigger house cheaper per dollar borrowed. It does not make it cheaper.

Over thirty years the interest difference is against new construction by in the neighborhood of $131,806. That one runs the other way here, which is what happens when the price gap is this wide.

Does any of that change if you are paying cash?

All of it changes, and this is the fork most of these comparisons never mention.

Everything in the section above runs on a rate the builder bought down. If you are paying cash, that advantage is worth exactly nothing to you. The builder's single largest lever does not reach you, and the comparison collapses back to price.

For Hilliard paying cash, the numbers are these: $620,760 for the median new construction close against $385,000 for resale. New construction costs $235,760 more, full stop. Per square foot it is still the better buy at $214 against $250, but a cash buyer writing one check feels the whole gap.

Hilliard does not flip. Cash or financed, the bigger house costs more. What financing does is make the bigger house cheaper per dollar borrowed, which is a different sentence from cheaper.

There is a second thing worth knowing if you are the cash buyer. The builder's incentive budget still exists, you are simply refusing the form they most want to pay it in. So ask for it in a form that reaches you. Closing costs. Design center allowance. Structural options included. The lot premium waived. Builders will often say yes to those, because the money comes from the same place the rate buydown would have. What you should not do is walk in with cash, decline their lender, and then ask for nothing else. I see that constantly and it leaves real money on the table.

The MLS shows this sorting already happening across Central Ohio. Cash is 20 percent of resale closings this year and 9 percent of new construction closings. Cash buyers gravitate to resale, and part of the reason is that the builder's best offer is one they cannot use.

Cash also buys you something in Hilliard that financing cannot: certainty in a fast market. When resale is moving in single-digit days, a cash offer with a short close wins against a financed offer at the same price, sometimes against a higher one. That leverage is real on the resale side and largely irrelevant on the builder side, because a builder is not choosing between competing offers on a spec home. They have a price and a queue.

Why is the tax number on a new construction listing so low?

Because the house is not on the tax rolls yet, and this is the one surprise in the deal.

Across Central Ohio this year, new construction listings show a median annual tax of $1,282 against $4,350 for resale. That looks like a gift until you notice new construction also sells for more. Run it as a share of price and new construction sits at 0.22 percent while resale sits at 1.29 percent. The listed figure is the land, assessed before anybody built on it.

Once the improvement is on the books it goes to the real rate. On the Hilliard median that is the difference between what the listing shows and the $667 a month in the table above. The rate you locked does not change. The tax does.

So underwrite the reassessed number, not the number on the listing sheet. Ask the county what the parcel will carry once it is fully assessed, and if a community is advertising a tax abatement, ask when it expires and what happens the year after. I have watched people budget the listing figure and get a genuine shock in year two, and it is completely avoidable.

What should you check before you sign in Hilliard?

1. Compare per square foot, not sticker. In this town especially. A $620,000 new build and a $385,000 resale are not competing offers, they are different houses. Price per foot is the only number that puts them on one axis.
2. Get the base price and the as-shown price on the same page. Model homes are built to sell the community. Ask what is standard and what is not, in writing, before you fall for a kitchen.
3. Ask the lot premium on every lot, not just yours. It tells you how the builder ranks their own inventory, which is information they did not mean to give you.
4. Read the completion date language, not the date. What happens if it slips, who covers interim housing, and whether your rate lock survives it.
5. Get your own inspection at framing and again before closing. Yes, on a brand new house. This is the construction read, and it is the most useful thing I do for anyone buying new. I walk it before the drywall goes up, while the framing, mechanicals and flashing are all still visible, and I have never once done that walk without finding something worth raising.

So is new construction worth it in Hilliard?

If you want a large house, yes, and the headline number has been lying to you. At 2,800 square feet and up you are paying about the same per foot as resale, sometimes slightly less, for a house built this year instead of one built in 1993.

If you want a modest house in Hilliard, new construction is not really an option and the resale market is where you belong. That is not a knock on either one. It is just that this town is building for one buyer and selling for another, and knowing which of the two you are saves you a month of looking at the wrong listings.

One thing I left out of this post: which of those five communities is giving the most right now, and what it is worth in real dollars. That moves month to month with the release schedule and the quarter, and publishing it would be stale by the time you read it. Send me the community name, or just your price range, and I will tell you what the last three closed for there, what is sitting, and what they are actually handing out this month. If you want to walk one, tell me before you go, because I will register you first.

Adam Geuy, REALTOR, Blacktree Realty. Call or text 937-239-2919.

Sources

• Columbus MLS, closed sales January 1 to August 27, 2026, Hilliard mailing address (n=518: 69 new construction, 449 resale). Medians computed on sold price, documented square footage and year built. Days on market is reported for resale only, because builders do not enter listings on the same schedule and the field is not comparable.
• Columbus MLS, active and pending inventory as of August 27, 2026, for community counts and asking prices.