Davidson Is Building Nearly 175 New Homes. Here's Why the Median Won't Budge

A buyer scrolling new construction in Davidson this fall will hit a number that looks like a gift: homesites at Summit Farms are expected to start around $400,000. The town's resale median, by contrast, sat at $685,000 over the three months ending in May 2026. That's a $285,000 gap, and it's the kind of gap that makes a buyer assume the market is about to soften.

It won't. Not because the new supply isn't real, but because the math behind that starting price has almost nothing to do with the math behind the town median. Three separate projects are moving through construction or approval in Davidson right now, and understanding why their entry prices sit so far below resale comps tells you more about how to shop this town than the median itself ever will.

Three Projects, One Supply Shift

Davidson rarely adds new subdivisions. Land is scarce inside town limits, and most of what gets built is infill on parcels that have been sitting in some planning queue for years. Right now, three of those queues are moving at once.

Summit Farms is the most visible. Summit Coffee, the Davidson-born brand, is anchoring a mixed-use development at the corner of Shearer Road and East Rocky River Road with a new headquarters and roasting facility, a Silly Goose Bakeshop retail bay, and a market building the developers call the Greenhouse. The residential piece, marketed under the name The Preserve, consists of 56 single-family lots ranging from 0.2 to 1.0 acres. The Town of Davidson approved the project's site construction documents in March 2026, and farm-related groundwork, grading, and infrastructure work followed that spring.

The Haley Property is a separate proposal from PulteGroup, working through the town's Neighborhood Edge Planning Area review process. It calls for roughly 94 to 99 single-family detached lots on 47 acres off Ralph Knox Road, bordering the established River Run and Bradford neighborhoods. As of the town's own project documentation, the plan had cleared Planning Board review in early 2025 and continued moving through the approval sequence.

Davidson Pointe Phase 2 is the smallest and, in a way, the most telling. Twenty-two single-family homes are planned along Bridges Farm Road, Caladium Drive, and Jillian's Lane, filling in a master plan the town originally approved back in 2000. Site utility and grading work started in late 2025, with home construction expected to begin in spring 2026. It has taken more than two decades for this particular lot to get built out.

Add the three together and Davidson is looking at something close to 175 new single-family homes entering the pipeline between now and 2028. For a town that closes only a few dozen resales in a typical month, that's not a rounding error. It's a meaningful jump in available supply, concentrated in a short window.

Why the Lot Sizes Explain the Price Gap

Here's the part that a headline starting price obscures: none of these new lots look like the lots that set the town's resale median.

River Run, Davidson's established golf and country club community, carries a median lot size of roughly 0.39 acres, with individual parcels ranging from 0.17 up to 1.15 acres. Homes there typically run from 2,800 to more than 7,000 square feet. Bailey Springs, a smaller and more moderately priced established neighborhood built mostly between 2007 and 2020, still carries a median lot size of about 0.19 acres, and single-family homes there have sold between $580,000 and $760,000 over the trailing year, with a median of 107 days on market.

Compare that to Summit Farms' Preserve lots, which start at 0.2 acres, or the smaller parcels likely to define parts of the Haley Property. A $400,000 starting price on a fraction of an acre isn't undercutting a $685,000 resale median built on larger, older, more established lots. It's a different product on a different footprint, and the per-acre or per-square-foot math tells a very different story than the sticker price does.

This is the piece that gets lost when a buyer compares a new-construction starting price directly against a town-wide median. The comparison isn't apples to apples. It's closer to comparing a townhome lot to a quarter-acre estate lot and treating the difference as a discount.

The Premium a Resale Comp Can't Capture

Summit Farms complicates the picture further because it isn't pricing itself purely on square footage and acreage. It's pricing a lifestyle brand that doesn't exist anywhere else in Davidson.

The development includes a working farm called The Garden, which will grow produce, herbs, and flowers for on-site sale, with plans to pursue organic certification. Summit Coffee's owner has described the intent as building something closer to a self-contained ecosystem than a typical subdivision, one where residents and visitors draw from the same crop fields and gathering spaces rather than commuting out for groceries or coffee. The commercial Village component includes the Greenhouse Market, an in-house deli, a wood-fired pizza restaurant, an ice cream shop, and a bookstore, alongside the Summit Coffee headquarters and roastery itself.

None of that shows up in a standard resale comparison. A three-bedroom home in Bailey Springs and a similarly sized home in Summit Farms' Preserve might carry comparable square footage, but one comes with proximity to a working farm, a bakery, and a coffee roastery that Davidson has never had before. Whether that premium is worth it is a personal calculation, but it's not a discount, and treating the lower starting price as evidence that new construction is simply cheaper misreads what's actually being sold.

Reading the Resale Market Alongside the New Supply

None of this happens in isolation from what resale buyers are already seeing. Davidson's resale market cooled in pace even as its underlying value kept climbing through the first half of 2026. The median sale price ran $685,000 over the three months ending in May, down 2.2 percent from the same period a year earlier. At the same time, the median price per square foot rose to $317, up 5.1 percent year over year, and homes took longer to sell, averaging 63 days on market compared to 48 days the year before. Fewer homes changed hands too: 75 sales in May 2026, down from 101 in May 2025.

Put together, that's a market where fewer people are transacting, homes are sitting slightly longer, and the underlying per-square-foot value is still rising. New construction landing into that environment doesn't reset it. It adds inventory at a different price point and a different lot size, which may ease competition for buyers who specifically want new construction, but it does very little to pull down what an established quarter-acre lot in River Run or Bailey Springs commands.

What This Means If You're Comparing New Construction to Resale

A few things worth checking before assuming a Davidson new-construction listing is the better deal:

• Compare price per acre, not just the sticker price, especially against neighborhoods like River Run or Bailey Springs where lot size is doing real work in the resale comp.
• Ask what phase a project is actually in. Haley Property was still moving through town review as of its most recent public filings, while Summit Farms and Davidson Pointe Phase 2 had construction underway. Timeline matters if you need to close within a specific window.
• Factor in what you're actually buying access to. A Summit Farms address includes proximity to a working farm and a food and beverage brand that isn't replicated in older Davidson neighborhoods. Decide whether that's worth a premium to you specifically, rather than assuming it nets out to a lower price.
• Don't extrapolate from one new subdivision to the whole town. Roughly 175 new homes phased in over two to three years is meaningful, but it's a fraction of Davidson's existing housing stock and won't move a town-wide median on its own.

Davidson's new construction pipeline is genuinely unusual for a town this size and this land-constrained. It's also not the affordability reset it might look like from the listing price alone. Reading it correctly means comparing lots to lots and lifestyle to lifestyle, not just sticker to sticker.

If you're weighing new construction against an established Davidson neighborhood, or trying to figure out what a specific lot size or location premium actually means for resale value down the road, Melody Fuhr can walk through the comparison with you directly. Schedule a white-glove consultation to talk through what fits your timeline and your goals.