Where Sacramento's new homes are going, and what they cost

Between Monday, September 14 and Friday, September 18, Sacramento builders filed 28 applications to put up new single-family houses inside city limits. Every one of them landed on one of two edges of the map: a lakeside subdivision in North Natomas and a master plan off Interstate 5 at the city's southern tip, Delta Shores.

That is where new houses are getting built in Sacramento right now. The older neighborhoods closer to downtown filed 12 backyard cottages and garage conversions, three duplexes and one fourplex over the same two weeks. The new single-family homes are going where the empty land is, and the four builders selling them are not all charging the same premium for it.

Houseberry's own ranking puts the North Natomas area near the top of the city. Natomas Park ranks 5th of 185 scored Sacramento neighborhoods, with a safety score of 4.4 out of 5, according to Houseberry's Sacramento neighborhood ranking. No Sacramento neighborhood clears 4 out of 5 overall, and the top score in the city is 3.8, so Natomas Park sits 0.2 points off first place.

Two edges of the map

We pulled the filings from the city's open permit-application data on October 5. The North Natomas group sits on four streets with marina names: Pirate Cove, King Harbor, Grand Marina and Hidden Harbor ways. All 13 came from Lennar Homes of California, split between two Northlake collections, Bleau and Shor. Northlake covers 577 acres with about 2,175 single-family homes planned at buildout, according to Builder magazine.

The Delta Shores group is on Valley Delta Way, Freshwater Way, Ruby Kinglet Drive, Woodpecker Way and Goldfish Way. Ten belong to Signature Homes' Catalina collection, four to KB Home's Riva and one to Meritage. Delta Shores is a 782-acre plan first approved in 2009 with about 5,000 homes on the drawing board, as the Sacramento Bee reported in 2022.

North Natomas building matters for a reason older Sacramentans remember. FEMA's 2008 flood map put the basin in a high-risk zone and stopped new construction there for seven years. Building resumed after the A99 designation took effect on June 16, 2015, once the levee rebuild was far enough along.

The two areas filed at very different price points. The median North Natomas valuation was $516,485. The median in Delta Shores was $428,728, about $88,000 lower.

What the permit number leaves out

The city appears to value every one of these houses with the same formula. A 2,144-square-foot Catalina plan is valued at $408,214. A 3,460-square-foot Lennar plan is valued at $655,107. Divide either one out and you land near $190 a square foot, builder after builder. So the permit valuation tells you how big the house is. It does not tell you what anyone will pay for it.

The list prices do. We matched each filed floor plan to the builder's current price on October 5.

Lennar's prices come from its Northlake pages. Riva's come from KB Home, and Catalina's and Dockside's from NewHomeSource.

That gap is land, impact fees, the street and sidewalk in front of the house, sales costs and profit. It is narrowest at Riva, where the cheapest plan lists $147,000 over its permit value. It is widest at Lennar's biggest Bleau plan, $218,000 over.

Delta Shores is where the prices moved

When KB Home opened Riva in May 2024, its launch announcement advertised homes from the low $600,000s. Today the community lists from $481,990. Signature Homes is advertising $30,000 in buyer incentives at Catalina through October 31. Lennar's Northlake collections, meanwhile, still run from $550,990 to $872,990.

We think that is the most useful fact in this batch of filings for anyone shopping this fall. The builders are still breaking ground in Delta Shores, and they are cutting price to sell what they build. A brand-new house under $500,000 is rare anywhere within two hours of the Bay Area.

For context, Sacramento's median sale price was $509,663 in August 2026, up 4.0 percent from a year earlier, per Redfin. New construction in Delta Shores now starts below that line. New construction at Northlake mostly sits above it.

Single-family filings across the Sacramento metro are down slightly this year. Builders pulled 5,291 single-family permits from January through August 2026, 4.0 percent fewer than the 5,511 over the same months of 2025, according to Census permit data on FRED.

Inside the city, the infill filings in the same window were small. We counted 12 ADU or garage-conversion applications from September 14 to 25. Three duplexes came from a single lot split in Central City on September 25. One fourplex was filed at 1225 Seville Way in East Sacramento, valued at $827,000. And the 28 houses from mid-September were not a one-week spike: builders filed 16 more production homes from September 1 to 13, bringing the month to 44 through the 25th.

What you get on each side of town

Houseberry scores the established neighborhoods around Northlake well on safety. Natomas Creek and Westlake each score 4.0 out of 5 for safety and 3.2 overall in Houseberry's October 2026 ranking, against Natomas Park's 4.4 and 3.6. School scores are lower across North Natomas, between 2.4 and 2.9 out of 5, because Houseberry's school score follows state test results.

Delta Shores is too new for a neighborhood score of its own.

The trade between the two areas is roughly this: North Natomas costs more and has a decade of finished parks, schools and retail around it. Delta Shores costs less and is still filling in, with its shopping center open and much of the housing yet to come.

Before you tour either one, compare the finished neighborhoods next door on Houseberry's Sacramento ranking, because in five years those are the streets your new house will be priced against.

Sources

• City of Sacramento building permit applications, current year, pulled October 5, 2026
• Lennar, Northlake collections
• KB Home, Riva at Delta Shores
• Sacramento County, Natomas building permits and the A99 designation
• FRED, Sacramento metro single-family permits
• Redfin, Sacramento housing market