A Pecan Square sales counselor will hand you a flyer this month that promises a sub-5% rate, twenty thousand dollars toward closing, and a kitchen upgrade on the house. All of that is real. None of it is the number that decides whether the home you are touring beats the resale across town. That number is sitting two pages deep in the disclosure packet, printed without commentary, and it is doing more work than any incentive on the front of the brochure.
If you are buying new construction in Northlake this summer, the friction nobody walks you through is not the price. It is what gets added to the tax bill every January for the next twenty-some years, and how that overlay quietly reprices every "deal" a builder is showing you.
Start with the line item below the headline
Every new home in Pecan Square sits inside two special districts whose rates are published on the builder's own disclosure pages. David Weekley Homes lists them right on the Pecan Square Estates community page:
Denton ESD No. 1: 0.060000 Northlake MMD No. 1: 0.705000
Those two lines together add roughly seventy-seven cents per hundred dollars of assessed value to the base ad valorem rate. On a $550,000 home, that is about $4,235 a year, or close to $353 a month, layered on top of the standard county, city, and school taxes a resale buyer in an older Northlake or Argyle ZIP would pay. The MMD is the municipal management district that funded the streets, water, and amenities you toured on the way in. It is not a fee. It is a tax line.
This matters because the financing incentives below are real, but they have to be weighed against a monthly carrying cost that a comparable resale outside the district simply does not carry. Builders know this. It is one reason they lean so hard on rate buydowns instead of price cuts: a rate buydown lowers the principal-and-interest line, where the tax overlay does its damage, without touching the contract price the appraiser uses for the next house on the street.
What the builders are actually offering at Pecan Square right now
Set the marketing language aside. Here is what is on the table as of June 2026, paraphrased from each builder's own published terms.
Highland Homes is the volume leader at Pecan Square and active on the 40, 50, 60, and 100-foot lots. Their current promotion gives buyers $20,000 toward closing costs or a rate buydown on any DFW home, available April 1 through June 30, 2026, and requires financing through Highland HomeLoans. The terms are stated on the Pecan Square 50-foot lots page.
Coventry Homes has published the most detailed buydown ladder I have seen on a Pecan Square 50-foot home this summer: 1.99% in year one, 2.99% in year two, 3.99% in year three, and 4.99% from year four through thirty, quoted at a 6.185% APR with 3.5% down and a 640 minimum FICO. Coventry's Pecan Square inventory at this writing runs from roughly $508,990 to $615,990 on plans between 2,100 and 3,290 square feet. The community page is on Coventry's site.
David Weekley Homes is running a year-long DFW financing program for select inventory homes, valid January 1 through December 31, 2026, with rates as low as 4.99%. Weekley is opening Pecan Square Estates on 70- and 100-foot homesites, which is the wider-lot tier inside the master plan.
D.R. Horton is offering the Main Street Stars program for military, law enforcement, firefighters, healthcare professionals, and educators. Financing is structured through DHI Mortgage, and the offer is documented through December 31, 2026 on the Pecan Square community page.
Two patterns are worth pulling out of that list.
The negotiation does not live where buyers think it lives
Notice what is missing from every builder's published offer: a base price reduction. There is a structural reason for that, and it is the most useful thing a buyer can understand before walking into a sales office.
Builders are protecting the comparable sales for the rest of the section. If Highland cuts $25,000 off the contract price of a Davenport plan in Phase 4, every future appraisal in that phase has to reckon with that comp. If Highland instead gives you $25,000 toward a permanent rate buydown, your monthly payment drops, your loan-to-value stays clean, the appraiser sees a list price the builder can defend, and the next buyer on the street gets a clean comp too. The economics line up for everyone except the buyer who assumed the discount would show up on the purchase agreement.
This is why the real leverage in a Northlake new-construction negotiation is almost never the contract price. It is the financing package, the design-center allowance, and the closing-cost credit. On Quick Move-In specs, where the builder is carrying the home as inventory and paying for the kitchen finishes whether you buy or not, the appetite for those concessions widens considerably. Independent market commentary on Northlake builders has noted Coventry running price reductions of $20,000 to $100,000 on completed Pecan Square inventory at various points this year, which is the closest thing to a true price cut you will see, and it only shows up on QMI homes the builder needs off the books.
If you are choosing between a Dirt Start, where you select finishes from the design center, and an Inventory Home that can close in thirty to sixty days, your negotiating posture should be different in each case.
| If you are buying a... | The lever that moves | The lever that doesn't |
|---|---|---|
| Dirt Start (ground-up build) | Design-center allowance, lot premium credit, structural option waivers | Base price, financing rate (locked at contract) |
| Quick Move-In spec | Permanent rate buydown, closing-cost credit, occasional inventory price cut | Floor plan, lot, structural changes |
A buyer who walks in asking for price off a to-be-built home is asking for the one thing the builder will not give. A buyer who walks in asking for a deeper buydown and a design-center credit on the same home is asking for the two things the builder is structured to give.
A more honest monthly comparison
Here is what the tax overlay does to a real comparison. Take a $550,000 Highland home in Pecan Square at Coventry's published 4.99% long-term rate with 3.5% down. Principal and interest land around $2,847 a month. Add the MMD and ESD overlay of roughly $353. Add base county, city, and Northwest ISD taxes. The all-in monthly payment on a Pecan Square home runs noticeably higher than the headline rate suggests.
Now take a $550,000 resale built in 2014 in a Northlake or Argyle subdivision outside the MMD, at a market rate closer to 6.5% with the same down payment. P&I is higher, around $3,300. But that $353 monthly overlay is gone. The gap between the two payments is much smaller than the gap between the two rates, and it narrows further once you account for the fact that the MMD rate is not going to step down for many years.
The new home still wins on warranty, energy efficiency, and the Northwest ISD on-site campus at Johnie Daniel Elementary. It often wins on total monthly cost too. But it does not win by the margin the rate flyer implies, and that is the conversation a buyer deserves to have before signing.
FAQ
Does the Northlake MMD rate ever come down? The MMD rate is set by the district to service infrastructure debt. It tends to step down only after specific bond obligations are retired, which is usually a multi-decade horizon. Treat the published rate as your operating assumption for the foreseeable future.
Can I use my own lender and still get the builder incentive? Almost never on the full amount. Highland's $20K offer, for example, explicitly requires financing through Highland HomeLoans. Builders use preferred-lender requirements to protect the incentive math. You can usually bring an outside lender, but you will leave most of the credit on the table.
Is a builder rate buydown better than negotiating a lower price? On a Dirt Start in an active section, almost always yes, because the price reduction the builder would actually agree to is much smaller than the present value of the buydown. On a finished QMI the builder has been carrying for months, the math can flip, and a price cut becomes worth pursuing.
Does the MMD/ESD overlay affect my appraisal or my loan amount? No. Those taxes affect your monthly escrow and your debt-to-income calculation, not the appraised value or the loan principal. They are the reason a buyer who qualifies easily for a $550,000 resale can come in tight on the same price in Pecan Square.
If you are weighing a Pecan Square contract this summer, or comparing it honestly against a resale in 76226 or 76247, that conversation is the one we have every week. Edson Miranda and the Miranda Realty Team will sit with you, run the real monthly numbers against the published district rates, and walk into the builder's office with you when it is time to talk terms.
Get Your Free Home Valuation and let's start with what your current home is worth before we look at what the next one actually costs.
