agreed - many medium cost places in central NC are still under $200/sqft for new builds, including the land. It's typically a smaller lot than, say, 3-4 years ago, and the construction quality is (continually?) slipping, etc, but location is still a huge factor.

We were close to pulling the trigger with a builder last fall and it was going to be around $180/sqft, and it was a custom build, and included around .8 acre. Lumber and material spike through the winter here has put that on hold (and put a lot of their building on hold) and we might not be able to afford a revised price when things 'get back' to normal. We'd actually had plans sent to an engineering firm who came back and said "you have to redesign this, because some of the foundational materials aren't available, and won't be for at least 6 months". So we couldn't even get a final price had we wanted to, without revising the original plans, and... there was no guarantee that whatever the redesign included would be available at that point (possibly now it would - this was back in March/April?). We're basically in a holding pattern for a bit longer (as are some of the other customers they had lined up).

Supplies, land, labour, demand, location, taxes are some of the things that make it difficult to have a universal construction cost per sq foot.

At a granular level maybe some comparisons are possible.

The original premise of the comment above that because it’s not the same as where I am.. it can’t exist anywhere else is all I was shedding some light on.