The May tally of new home sales from the U.S. Census Bureau is out next week. Sales declined in April after steady growth since January, a bad sign for the spring selling season and for homebuilders. To compensate, two-thirds of builders are offering incentives, according to the National Association of Home Builders. It’s a way to attract buyers amid higher interest rates. Cara Lavender at John Burns Research and Consulting surveys about 300 builders monthly. She said incentives are now averaging around 7% of the asking price for a property — that’s about twice the pre-Covid average. “So incentives can be a range of things, right? Things like design options spend, so getting $15,000 or $50,000 or whatever it may be, to spend in the design studio,” to customize a new home, she saidJoel Berner, a senior economist at Realtor.com, said sometimes builders will include appliances for free.“They'll do free upgrades on build to order homes, so if you want that quartz countertop or whatever it may be, the builder may include that at no cost just to get you to sign the deal,” he said.Builders might also offer cash for closing costs. They might even cut the asking price for a home — but only as a last resort, said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the NAHB.“When you artificially lower the price of a home, you're essentially disconnecting that price from construction costs, and thus setting expectations in the future that could be difficult to reverse,” he said.Often, lowering what the monthly payment will be is a key selling point, experts say. One way builders have been doing that is by lowering the interest rates buyers pay on mortgages — lower than what buyers could get at a bank.Builders do this by essentially buying mortgages in bulk from a lender, said Ali Wolf, chief economist at the housing data and consultancy firm Zonda. “Put simply, they shell out a lot of money to then be able to offer these rates lower. That's not something you and I could do. That's only something that the builder can do, because they have to put millions of dollars up front,” she said.All of this leaves potential buyers with a bewildering array of options, if they can afford to take advantage of the deals in the first place.