Roland has some sound advice. I built new homes for decades. The DW and I spent three years, post FIRE, searching for a place to relocate, which covered about every desirable spot from the Colorado front range, east to the Atlantic ocean. We choose a highly desirable area on the east coast, and for the first time since I was a late teenager, I bought a home, instead of building my own, or buying a near tear down, to flip. The math is simple. A lot in this area is about as rare as lips on a Chicken. If you find one, they start at $100-125K. That's not acreage, BTW,but typically a 9-12000 sq. ft. in town lot. As Roland notes, it doesn't take long to add $40 to $60K in permits, fees, and general horseshit, to earn the right to put a foundation in. So, in these parts, it's at least $150K for a less than stellar lot, once you are fully permitted. Instead, I paid $238K for a funky, mid-century, solid brick ranch, on a lot that's to die for. It's 4/10th of an acre, with a southern view that runs for miles, and looks like a postcard. So, one way to do math, is that we bought a stunning lot, and for another 90K ended up with a really cool house. It just simply didn't make any sense to build here. I would of had $300K invested in a modest home, on an inferior lot, and it would be worth about $70K less than it cost to build. Unfortunately that kind of math pretty much guarantees that any new home built here is a $500K, 4000 sq. ft. monster.