BRRRR vs. New Construction: Which Makes More Money in 2026 (I Did the Math)

Dave Meyer:
Should you buy a fixer-upper as an investment property or a brand new house? For years, we’d never even asked this question. Buying a property, fixing it up to increase its value, and renting it out was the obvious choice. But the market has changed, and renting out a newly built home is more appealing than it’s ever been before. We’re seeing dropping prices, mortgage rate buydowns, and new properties don’t come with maintenance worries. It is an outside the box option, but savvy investors are taking notice. But of course, renovations with the BRRR method can still be one of the most powerful scaling tools available to investors. So which one should you pick? At the end of the day, it really just all comes down to the math. So today in the show, I’m going to analyze two deals in the exact same market, one new construction, one BRR deal, and we’re going to put them head-to-head to see what’s a better investment in 2026.
New construction or value add? The answer might surprise me.
Hey everyone, it’s Dave. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. We got a fun show today. I am really excited about it. We’re actually just going to compare two different types of investments and decide which is the best one in 2026. We’re going to first look at a classic kind of investment, a value add deal, kind of like a burr where you renovate an existing home, rent it out, build some equity. It’s a classic. We’re going to compare that to buying new construction, which may not be a strategy you’ve thought of before. But I think as we go through this episode, you’ll see that the pros and cons and the trade-offs of each strategy really might surprise you. If you had asked me before COVID, should I go out and buy new construction? I would’ve said no in one second. I wouldn’t have even really thought about it.
As an investor myself, it never crossed my mind for at least the first 12 years or so of my investing career because buying a property that needed some repairs, even just a cosmetic update was just a no-brainer way to build equity in your portfolio. That was basically the whole job of being the investor was doing the BRRR over and over and over again. But there are things in the market going on right now that make it intriguing to buy new construction. And there are four things you should know about why investors should consider new construction right now. The first one is that builders are sitting on a ton of inventory that they’ve already built and haven’t sold yet. All of this inventory means that builders are willing to cut deals because builders just have a different business model than a home seller. If a regular homeowner doesn’t like their price, they might just choose not to sell.
But the way a builder’s business model works is they have to move this inventory, otherwise they’re just paying for it indefinitely and that doesn’t work for them. And so they’re offering all sorts of incentives to get these homes off their books. These incentives come in the form of rate buydowns, which we’re going to talk about a lot right now. A lot of them are advertising five and a half percent mortgage rates on their websites right now. They’re also doing seller concessions, which can reduce the cost of your closing costs, for example, or you can negotiate better finishes in their home. And sometimes they’re even willing to drop the price. The second thing is, and listen to this because it’s kind of crazy, to go out and buy a newly built home right now is cheaper than buying an existing home on average across the United States.
There’s actually an analysis that the National Association of Home Builders did, and they found that the median home price for a newly built home was $1,400 less than an existing home. Now $1,400 grand scheme of things, not that big of a deal, but this is not normal. Usually new construction to go out and buy a new home is a lot more expensive than going out and buying the existing home. But the opposite is true right now, which is exactly what makes this so interesting to look at. So those are two things that are sort of happening right now in 2026. Then on top of that, there are some benefits that are always there. A newly built home is going to have lower maintenance and repair costs, especially in early years, which allows you to build up reserves and save up for your next purchase. That’s a great thing for your portfolio.
And then the second thing, that is not true in every situation, but in many situations, new construction is going to have higher renter demand. People will be attracted to a new home with modern amenities more than a dated home. So that means one, you may have lower vacancies, but two, you can probably charge higher rent. So when you put all those things together, the fact that builders are willing to cut deals, that new construction is cheaper than existing homes, the lower maintenance and repair costs and higher renter demand, it makes it worth looking at. For the first time, maybe in at least as long as I’ve been an investor, but probably for many decades, for the first time, it’s actually worth looking at. With that, let’s jump into the analysis. And for this analysis, we’re going to look at two properties in the exact same market.
And I picked, not entirely randomly, Sherman, Texas. Why Sherman? I wanted a good area where I could find a solid deal for both kinds of investments. New construction is not everywhere. Builders tend to build sort of in pockets. I went on Lennar, they’re one of the biggest home builders in the country. They actually have an investor marketplace. So I went on there, looked for deals that I liked new construction for, and I found a deal in Sherman, Texas that I like. And I like Sherman because it’s near Dallas, which is a very good investing market, some of the best jobs, best population growth in the country. And Sherman in particular, which is a suburb of Dallas or a small city outside Dallas in particular has huge investments in chip manufacturing. Texas Instruments actually is investing $60 billion into the area. It’s creating thousands of new high paying jobs that leads to the needs for more work for housing.
So it’s a good area. It’s also super affordable, which I really like. It’s about half the national average in terms of price. So I genuinely like Sherman and I was able to find what I think is a good bird deal and a good new construction deal so we can get a true test of which one’s better. All right, so first up, I am going to analyze the new construction deal, but we do have to take a quick break. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Today we’re doing a head-to-head between new construction and the burr in Sherman, Texas. I’m going to start my analysis by just running the numbers on the new construction. So here’s the deal I found. It is from Lennar, that’s the builder. They’re one of the biggest builders in the country, and they have this property listed for $243,000 and it’s in Sherman, Texas. So if you look at it, it’s a little bit outside Sherman, but it’s really not on the outskirts. So I like that. That is something you really do need to look for in new construction. Sometimes they kind of build in the middle of nowhere and you definitely don’t want that. Now, I wish they had better pictures on the website, but they don’t. But you can go on their website and look at some of their stock homes.
It’s pretty nice. It is builder grade. It’s not super high-end finishes, but it is going to be a pretty nice home. If you walked into it, you’d say, “This is a nice house. It has all the amenities I was expecting.” Now, I did go onto the street here and what I saw, I was doing the street view, is that it’s not super developed over here. It’s going to be in a subdivision with a lot of similar homes, which we’ll talk about for rents in just a minute. But some of the specs on this house, four bed, two bath, great for almost anyone, for families. It’s 1,700 square feet, so not huge for four bedrooms, but still a very nice size home. It’s a one-story ranch, which is super convenient and appealing to a lot of people, and it has a two-car garage, also a big selling point.
All right, so now that we’ve combed through the listing a little bit, I’m going to move over to the BiggerPockets calculator. If you want to follow along here, you can go to biggerpockets.com/calculator and check out how to do great deal analysis really quickly. So what I’m going to do here is just put in for now, I’m going to assume I’m paying full asking price for this. So that was $243,000, so I’ll put that into the calculator. And they actually, one of the nice things about buying from a builder is they’ve figured out a lot of the cost for you and they put their own closing costs at 3,500 bucks so you know that’s what you’re going to be doing. You’re not going to be rehabbing this property, so there’s no opportunity for value add in new construction. That is one of the cons or the downsides to this is you can’t build equity, right?
There’s nothing to fix on this property. It’s brand new. And so the analysis is actually pretty straightforward here because we know what we’re buying it for, 243. I’m going to assume that you’re buying this as an investor and putting 25% down. And on their website, you might have noticed that they were advertising five and a half percent mortgage rates. So they’re saying that they’re just telling you right off the bat, you don’t even need to go out and negotiate this. They’re offering you right off the bat, five and a half percent interest rates. Now, right now, as of today, when I’m recording this, mortgage rates are around 6.6 – ish for a primary. So for an investor, you’re probably looking at something like 7%. And so that’s very significant savings having one and a half percentage points off your mortgage rates. Next, we’re going to put in rent.
I did some comps before this, and what I was looking at is around $2,000 is what I think we can get. That’s pretty good. If you’re looking at the rent to price ratio, getting two grand in rent for a property you’re buying for 243,000 is pretty good. So I’m already thinking this property is going to cash flow, but we’re in Texas and this is where things start to hurt a little bit is where you get your property taxes. Texas has one of the highest property tax rates in the entire country at 2.2%. They don’t have an income tax, so they got to get their tax somewhere. But that means that for this property, even though you’re just buying it for 243, the annual taxes are $5,346. So that’s going to take a bite out of your cash flow, but that’s just what it is. For insurance, actually, Lennar has scoped this out for us and it’s $1,280.
So those are our fixed costs. We know our mortgage, we know our taxes, and we know our insurance. That stuff’s not going to change over the lifetime of our hold. But now we move on to what are called variable costs. So these are things like repairs and maintenance and capital expenditures. Capital expenditures are similar to repairs and maintenance, but it’s big ticket items. It’s like repairing a roof or adding a new unit or adding an HVAC system, air conditioning, something like that. It’s treated differently by the IRS, so we separate them. Now, this is where new construction really starts to shine. For repairs and maintenance, a lot of times they come with warranties for several years, and there should be no capital expenditures in my mind for eight years. First thing you’ll probably have to replace is a water heater. Hopefully that’s eight to 10 years from now, but your HVAC should be good, your roof should be good for 20 to 30 years, all of your electrical and plumbing, none of that’s going to have problems.
Siding shouldn’t have any problems. So you can put the numbers here for your repairs, maintenance, capital expenditures, which are really big things, a lot lower. Now I’m not going to put them at zero. And in fact, I’m going to keep my repairs and maintenance at 3% and I’m going to put my capital expenditures at 2%. So I’m going to keep total 5% in reserves. Now, the reason I’m not making it zero, even though it should be zero for several years, is because I want to build up a cash reserve and sometimes things break. Now with a builder, when you’re negotiating, you should get that warranty, right? And so you’re doing no repairs and maintenance for the first two years, but I just want to put away some of my money so that in year five, six, seven, when I get to the point where I have to replace that water heater, I’ve put some money aside.
But hopefully you’re not touching that cash reserve for a long time because the stuff is so new. The one reason I do have repairs and maintenance is not because I expect something to break, it’s actually because they’re a turnover cost. If you have a tenant for two or three years and they move out, you’re going to have to touch some stuff up. So I like putting money away for that even though I’m not going to have to really repair any big things because a warranty’s not going to cover that. So that’s why I keep it at around 5%. Vacancy, I’m going to put at 5% as well. And then property management fees as an out-of-state investor, I usually pay about 8%. Now that’s it. This is a single family home, so I’m not planning as the property owner to pay for the utilities. I’m going to just have my tenants sign up for electricity and gas, water, garbage, all of that, right?
I don’t have to think about that. So I’m just going to hit finish analysis and let’s see how this deal does. All right, so here’s what we got. For our property in Sherman, Texas, just analyzing it the way I did it, we had $53 a month in cash flow for a 1% cash on cash return. Not great, but that’s a cash flowing rental property that’s going to have very little work. But if this were me, if there’s no value add opportunity, a 1% cash on cash return is not good enough. But luckily, this is not how we have to buy this deal. Remember, when I did this analysis, I just put in things as they were asking for, right? They were asking for 243. There’s all that inventory on the market. Remember, this is the time to negotiate. And so there are a couple of things I would try and do if I were going out to buy this property.
When you go to negotiate for new construction, you need to keep in mind, again, the business model of the builders. In this area where this home is, they’re probably building dozens, if not hundreds of homes. And so when you go out and negotiate, think about what the builder is thinking. They want to, almost at all costs, maintain their comps, because if they offer you 5% off this home and sell it to you for 220, now that is a comp that everyone else is going to see. So every other home they go and sell potentially dozens or hundreds of more homes are going to be comped against that lower price. Texas where we’re buying this, this is a non-disclosure state, but in most states, other people are going to see that. The point here though is that builders are going to try and preserve the purchase price more than anything else.
So even though you should try and negotiate price, and you can usually get it down a little bit, but they’re going to be more stubborn on that, what you want to really try and do is get other types of seller concessions. And the things I would focus on are one, a rate buydown and two, getting rid of all of your closing costs. That can lower your expenses, right? But then on top of that, you can maybe negotiate for a longer warranty to control your repair costs or better upgrades like nicer appliances or something in the unit. Now as an investor, I would actually go in that order of priority for me personally. I’d want to get my rate down first, then I try and get rid of the closing costs, then I try and get the longer warranty, and then I go for the nicer fixtures.
So they are advertising on their website a five and a half percent mortgage rate. I actually bet you can probably negotiate a three point buy down right now. I bet you can get it to about four and a half percent. That’s like a two and a half point buy down. So now I’m going to go in and just assume I can get a four and a half percent interest rate and I can negotiate this down and I’m going to put my closing costs at zero because I’m going to assume they’re willing to give up 3,500 bucks. So if I do that, that saves me 3,500 bucks and that gets our cash on cash return up to 3.25. So honestly, I think this is pretty good. In most markets, you just can’t find a 3% cash on cash return deal. You just can’t. If you want to go out and buy a quote unquote turnkey property where everything’s done and you don’t have to work and you could just kind of set it and forget it, this is a pretty good deal.
You’re in a good area that is likely going to appreciate long-term. You’re getting a 10% annualized growth rate, which is about the stock market or better, and you’re getting tax advantage cash flow at the same time. Now, this is a pretty good deal in my opinion. Now, is it as good as Burr? We’re going to look at that, but I think for some investors this works, but at the same time, I would still try and negotiate down the price a little bit, right? I’d like to get it to a four or 5% cash on cash return. That beats bonds, that beats most dividend stocks. So I think if I can get this for like 235, that gets you to a 4% cash on cash return, 200 bucks a month in cash flow.That’s a good deal in today’s market. So this is why I’m talking about new construction right now.
Everyone says you can’t find cash flow and cash flow is dead, but this is cash flow for a newly built property in a good area, right? The difference is this rate buydown, getting that four and a half percent mortgage rate instead of a 7% mortgage rate goes from most deals on the MLS that do not cash flow to a deal that does cash flow, that’s going to have a warranty, that’s going to have high demand, that’s in a good area. This is why we’re talking about new construction right now because this is actually a good thing worthy of consideration for a lot of investors. But is it as good as the burr? We’re going to get to that analysis right after this break.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m Dave Meyer. We’re doing our analysis head-to-head between new construction and the burr. Before the break, I analyzed a new construction deal and found that we could get somewhere between a three and 4% cash on cash return for a newly built home in a good area. That is pretty compelling. It’s not the sexiest cash on cash return on earth, but in a good neighborhood for a newly built home, that is a pretty darn good deal. So we got to compare that now and see if the burr can do better. So for our analysis, I was just poking around on Zillow looking for a deal, and I found in Sherman, Texas, in a good neighborhood. I actually think this is a slightly better neighborhood. It’s closer to sort of the walkable downtown of Sherman, Texas. And I found it for $160,000.
And the reason I picked this is one, I think there’s opportunity for a value add. It’s a good Burr candidate, and it’s very, very similar to new construction. So I really wanted to compare apples to apples. This property is four bed, three bath. So our new construction was 4-2. So this actually has a third bathroom, but it’s about the same size. It’s 1,700 square feet. This property, only a one-car garage versus our new construction, a two-car garage. So these are important things when you’re comping things out, but obviously we’re not going to find two exactly same properties. So I think these are pretty darn close. This property was built in 1961, which I like, really like homes built in the ’60s and ’70s, and it’s on a very nice sized lot of 8,000 square feet. We can look at the pictures here. It’s a nice ranch style home.
It looks like it’s in pretty good shape. You can see at least in the living room, there are hardwood floors that can definitely stay. Those look pretty nice. I’m looking at the ceiling here. It’s popcorn ceiling, so we’re probably going to have to scrape that. Kitchen definitely needs to be renovated. It might be original cabinets in there. Some of it’s been upgraded, but we’re going to have to scrap that kitchen and start fresh there. Man, there’s different kinds of floors in every single room in this house, so we’re probably going to need some new flooring. It’s definitely going to need paint. Oh, this bathroom’s nice. So one of the bathrooms has been upgraded, so that’ll help save us some money. The second bathroom definitely needs to be upgraded. It’s not terrible, but it can use some work. And then the third bathroom needs some work.
Backyard’s not awful. There’s some weird pergola thing, but we’re going to need to put some work into the landscaping here. So overall, I was looking a little bit into expenses of the area. My estimate is that we’re going to put in $30,000 into this project, so not crazy. I actually analyzed it. It came to about 25,000, but I’m just looking at Zillow right now. I don’t know if there’s something lurking in the walls here, so I’m going to throw an extra $5,000 into the budget because realistically, having done this a lot, there’s probably something wrong here that I am not seeing, so I’m going to put another $5,000 in here. Now, the other reason I like this is because of the comps. Now, Texas makes comping hard because they are a non-disclosure state, which means that they don’t post what things sold for recently, which is a bummer.
But I was just looking around at other listings, similar listings in the area, and I found this one here for 2.85. This is a super similar home. This is a 4-2 for 1,700 square feet. So this is very similar and it’s right around the corner. Now, we don’t know if it will sell for this price, but I am guessing, let’s just knock it down that it’s going to sell instead of for 2.85. Let’s say it’s going to sell for 2.75, but this looks like what I would try and get this property to. It has nice floors, fresh paint, a builder sort of renter grade kitchen, but it’s solid, right? It’s a solid spot. On top of that, I also found another one that was actually for 3.20. This is a little bit bigger home. It’s about 2,000 square feet, but it’s also a 4.2. It’s in a little better shape, but it’s not super modern.
So I would peg this one, maybe it will sell at 300. So I’m going to put my ARV, my after repair value for this property that we’re going to bur at 270, 275. Let’s just call it 270. We’re going to be conservative on this, but we can buy this property at 160 and we’re putting $30,000 into it. So I’m already liking what this property is going to look like, but to really tell, we’re going to have to go to the calculator and run the numbers. All right, so we’re going to do our analysis here. We’re going to put in our property address and then go to our purchase price, which is 160,000. Purchase closing costs are going to be, let’s call it 4,500 bucks. It’s going to be probably a little more expensive than going with the builder. They usually pay for some of those expenses.
And ideally, like we talked about in our negotiation, you’re playing zero closing costs for new construction. So the thing you got to do here when you’re doing a value add is click this tab. If you’re watching on YouTube, click this tab on the BiggerPockets calculator and go and put in the after repair value. I’m going to be conservative here. Let’s just call it 260 just in case we’re low, and we’re going to put the repair values. I said 30,000. Let’s just call it 35,000. I’m just going to be extra conservative on this deal because I don’t know that much about it. Next, we’re going to move onto our down payment, which I’m going to put at 25% because we’re investors and our interest rate’s going to be 7%. That’s going to be a really big, probably the biggest difference between new construction and BRR. And so 7% between four and a half percent, that’s going to eat into your cash flow a little bit.
But on this property, I think we could probably get similar rents. I think it’s actually maybe a little bit higher because of the location. Let’s call it 2050 instead of 2000 just because of the location. It’s in a more mature neighborhood. For expenses, our taxes are, man, it’s 4,800 bucks, super expensive here. Insurance, 1200 bucks. Repairs and maintenance, I’m going to put 5% repairs and maintenance. I’m going to put 8% for our capital expenditures just because it’s an older home, things are going to come up, vacancy at 5%, management fees at 8%. And then for our other variable costs, I’m not touching them because again, I’m going to just have tenant pay it. They’re going to pay electricity, gas, all that. So with that, let’s finish our analysis. What we get here, pretty darn good deal. Wow. So this deal right here would come out right off the bat, $218 a month in cash flow for a 3.3% cash on cash return.
So right here, even without negotiating, we’re getting about the same cash on cash return, pretty darn close to new construction. So this is actually, I just did this analysis for the first time, but this is actually a really good head-to-head comparison. But the thing I want you to think about here is it’s not just about cash on cash return. We have this other metric here on the BiggerPockets calculator that you should look at, which is your compound annual growth rate. This is how quickly you’re benefiting from all the things that you benefit in real estate because it’s not cash flow. It’s appreciation, cash flow, amortization, tax benefits. And if you remember back to the new construction, that was growing about 10%. But with the BRRR deal, it’s 17%. And it’s not because of the cash flow, it’s because you invested $35,000 to drive up the value of this property by nearly $100,000.
That is the reward you get for going out and doing the work, taking on the risk, taking on the time commitment to go out and do the BRRR. You get a very similar cash on cash return, but your equity is growing so much faster in the BRRR. And that obviously helps if you want to stare at your net worth, but that’s not why most of us are in it. Most people are looking to scale their portfolio. And by building that equity, that means you can refinance out of this, take it and go do another deal. Now, when you refinance it, you should know that your cash on cash return is going to go down, right? You’re going to be taking out a bigger loan, and so your cash on cash return is going to go closer to break even, but that’s a decision that you get to make.
That’s the beauty of building equity is you get to decide, do I want to hold onto this property that has good equity and get a higher cash on cash return, or do I take a property that’s still going to be breaking even or better? It’s not going to have great cash flow, but I can take my money out and go do this exact same deal again so I can scale up and build our portfolio. This is what’s so great about the BRRR. So which one is better though, right? As you can see, both have their pros and cons. New construction is better because it’s less work. It’s far more predictable and you’re going to have a lot less headaches. And actually, a new construction deal will probably have better cash flow than a BRRR after you do your refinance on that BRRR. So there’s a lot to like about that new construction, but the BRRR is better for scaling.
If you want to build equity and you really place a lot of value on recycling your capital so you can keep using the same money to acquire more and more and more properties, the BRRR is better. So here’s personally how I would think about it. If you are early in your investing career and you want to acquire more units, I would go with the BRRR still. There’s just the value of recycling your capital with the BRRR strategy just really can’t be replicated anywhere else. The opportunity to build equity is so valuable early in your career if you’re not starting with a lot of capital. So for me, if I were in that circumstances, I was early and trying to scale up, I would probably still do this BRR deal. In other circumstances though, I would do new construction. And I think there’s sort of like three buckets of investors that this makes sense for.
The first is you already have a lot of money. Good for you. If you got a lot of money, I would just go out and buy these deals. It’s going to be less headache. You can buy them pretty easily. You’re not going to have to scour for tons of deals. It’ll probably work really well for you. The second is if you work full time and you have a longer time horizon, if you’re comfortable building financial freedom, building your portfolio over the next 15, 20 years, I would do new construction, right? That property is going to still be in good shape 15 years from now, and that’s really, really valuable. And if you’re just like, I have a high enough income, I can put enough money away or I can still buy a new construction deal like this for $240,000 every two to three years, that’s pretty good.
You’re not going to have a lot of problems and it’s going to be pretty darn sure. That’s a lot of predictability about your portfolio. So if you’re willing to take 15-ish years to do this, man, that is pretty compelling. Burr, like I said, if you want to scale aggressively, build up your portfolio seven, eight, 10 years to financial Freedom, that’s what I was saying with the burr. But there’s also a third bucket, I guess, of people who I would consider new construction for, and those are people in their harvest phase. I’ve talked about this before, I’ve stolen this framework from Chad, Chad Carson, but he says there’s a starting phase, a scaling phase, and a harvest phase. Like I said, if you’re scaling, I think brew makes a lot of sense, but if you’re in the point where you’ve built a lot of equity in your portfolio and you want to sell off some properties and maybe just make the management of your total portfolio easier, new construction’s pretty compelling, right?
You can go out and earn a cash on cash return of three and a half percent right now. It’s going to grow to five, six, 7% in the next couple of years. And I mean, that’s pretty good to retire off of, right? If you could do that now and start harvesting, you’re just going to have low maintenance deals that just produce more and more cashflow every year, that’s also pretty compelling. So for new construction, I’d say people in their harvest phase, people who already have a lot of cash, or people who are working full-time and want to take 15-ish years, new construction can absolutely be the right option for you. So I hope this analysis is helpful for you when you’re trying to decide what your next deal should be. I just think this is a really interesting question, and I actually thought of this question in an episode because I saw information about new construction in the BiggerPockets newsletter, which was just relaunched.
It’s awesome. It is called The Investor Brief, and it is just chock full of information that help you get a leg up on your investing. A lot of people wouldn’t know to look at new construction, but BiggerPockets is putting out news like this three times a week. That’s the BiggerPockets Investor Brief. You can sign up at biggerpockets.com/newsletter. That’s our show for today. Thank you all so much for watching the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m Dave Meyer. I’ll see you next time.