Riverton and Herriman home loans are, more often than not, loans on a house that does not exist yet. The southwest corner of Salt Lake County is where most of the valley's remaining buildable ground sits, and that one fact changes almost everything about the financing conversation. The paperwork is different, the appraisal is different, the timeline is different, and the property tax number you are quoted at closing is very likely not the number you will be paying two years from now.
That last item is the one that surprises people. Utah values property as it stood on January 1, and Salt Lake County publishes no mid-year catch-up bill. A buyer who closes on a brand new home in Herriman in September can spend a full year paying an escrow amount built around a piece of dirt, and then watch the payment move when the completed house lands on the roll.
Our office sits at 2150 South 1300 East in Salt Lake City, and the Sharla Ellis Team writes loans throughout Salt Lake County. Below we cover what actually differs when you finance new construction in Riverton and Herriman: the 2026 limits that apply, the January 1 tax rule and what it does to your escrow, how FHA classifies a house by how finished it is, how a construction-to-permanent loan is structured, what to know before you take the builder's lender incentive, and what to verify before you sign.
Riverton and Herriman sit at the southwest edge of the Salt Lake Valley, against the Oquirrh foothills, and they arrived at the same place from opposite directions. Riverton is the older of the two. Settlers reached the area in the mid 1850s, Nicholas T. Silcock arrived in the spring of 1865, and the settlement was known as Gardnersville until a judge changed the name to Riverton in 1879. By the city's own account it had grown enough to incorporate as a city by 1948. Today Riverton counts a population over 45,000, runs 33 community parks, hosts Intermountain Riverton Hospital, and anchors the 94 acre Mountain View Village mixed-use development at 13400 South. City hall is at 12830 South Redwood Road.
Herriman is the newer story and a genuinely unusual one. It incorporated in 1999 with roughly 800 residents. Census data cited by the city shows it was the fastest-growing city over 10,000 residents in the United States between 2010 and 2019, and it grew 18.4 percent between 2010 and 2020. The city's published community facts put the median age at 32.4 and count roughly 2,700 acres of open space and parks, along with a Salt Lake Community College and University of Utah joint campus and the Lone Peak Hospital Herriman Emergency Center. City hall is at 5355 West Herriman Main Street.
Both cities are served by Jordan School District, and both are still building. Herriman's south side has three master development agreements approved in November 2024, covering Panorama, Rosecrest, and South Hills, structured so that roads, water lines, and other infrastructure go in ahead of homes. The Juniper Crest Road extension is expected to finish in 2026 and Panorama Park is targeted for the end of 2028. If you are shopping here, you are shopping a market where the inventory is partly still on paper.
Underwriting guidelines do not change by city. What changes in the southwest valley is the share of purchases where the house is unfinished, unbuilt, or finished so recently that it has never been lived in. That puts a different set of rules in play than a resale on the east bench, and it is why Riverton and Herriman home loans deserve their own walkthrough.
None of that makes a new build harder to finance. It makes it a different sequence, and the buyers who get caught out are almost always the ones who ran it like a resale.
Both cities are in Salt Lake County, so both take the Salt Lake County figures, and those two figures are not the same number.
The 2026 conforming loan limit for a one unit home in Salt Lake County is 832,750 dollars, set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The 2026 FHA limit for a one unit home in Salt Lake County is 637,100 dollars, published separately by HUD. Different agencies, different methods, roughly 195,650 dollars apart, and not interchangeable.
That gap matters more here than it does in a resale market, because new construction pricing moves as you add options. A base plan that clears the FHA ceiling comfortably can stop clearing it once you have selected the upgraded lot, the finished basement, and the third-car bay. The limits apply to the loan amount rather than the purchase price, so a larger down payment can pull a file back under a ceiling, but the design center is a place where an FHA plan can quietly stop working. Tell us which program you are counting on before you start selecting, not after. Our complete guide to Salt Lake County home loans covers the county-wide picture, and our Salt Lake County home values guide covers where pricing sits by submarket.
This is the part of a southwest valley purchase we most want you to read twice.
Utah assesses property based on what existed on a single date. The Salt Lake County Assessor states it plainly: all property is valued as it existed on January 1. The county's published property tax calendar then runs a Notice of Valuation and Tax Change to taxpayers on July 22, a Board of Equalization appeal window from August 1 to September 15, official tax notices from the Treasurer on November 1, and a final payment date of November 30 before penalty.
Read that calendar against a construction schedule. If your Herriman home was a graded lot on January 1 and you take possession in September, the value on the roll for that year generally reflects the lot as it stood in January. The completed house lands on the following January 1 valuation, which means you first see it on a Notice of Valuation the following July and first pay it on a tax notice the following November. Salt Lake County's published calendar contains no supplemental or prorated mid-year bill to bridge that gap, so nothing corrects it in between.
The financing consequence is an escrow account. If your escrow was funded around a lot-level figure, it is collecting too little for the house you actually own, and the correction arrives at your first escrow analysis as a higher monthly payment plus a shortage to make up. Nothing has gone wrong and nobody has made a mistake. The tax roll simply caught up.
There is a second layer worth understanding. Utah's primary residential exemption, administered by the Utah State Tax Commission, exempts 45 percent of the fair market value of residential property and up to one acre of land, leaving a primary residence taxed on 55 percent of value. Land that is not yet residential does not get that treatment the same way, and for property that becomes residential after January 1 the state applies a part-year rule requiring the home to be used as a primary residence for 183 or more consecutive calendar days in that calendar year. So the exemption status on a new build can shift between the year you close and the year after.
What we do about it is simple. We ask what figure your escrow is being built on, and if it is a lot-level number we tell you the payment you should actually be planning around rather than the one on the first statement. Confirm the specifics for your parcel with the county, since assessment practice and exemption status are county matters rather than lender matters.
Building in Riverton or Herriman and want the real payment, not the first-year one?
Send us the builder, the lot, and the estimated completion date, and we will show you what the payment looks like once the completed house is on the tax roll, so the escrow adjustment is something you planned for instead of something that happens to you. It takes one conversation, there is no cost to ask, and there is no obligation to move forward. Call the Sharla Ellis Team at (801) 580-1861.
FHA does not treat a new house as one thing. It sorts the property into one of three categories based on how finished it was when the appraiser saw it, and the category drives the paperwork.
Each category has its own inspection path. For proposed construction the lender obtains the building permit and certificate of occupancy, or three inspections at footing, framing, and final. For a home under construction it is the permit and certificate of occupancy, or a final inspection. For a home existing less than one year it is the certificate of occupancy, or a final inspection. Those inspections come from the local authority with jurisdiction or a certified inspector, with a licensed architect or structural engineer as the fallback where no certified inspector is available.
Beyond inspections, HUD requires specific builder paperwork in the file, including form HUD-92541, the Builder's Certification of Plans, Specifications, and Site, and form HUD-92544, the Warranty of Completion of Construction. Termite documentation and, where the local jurisdiction requires it, well water or septic reports go in as well. This framework comes from Mortgagee Letter 2020-36, which took effect for case numbers assigned on or after January 4, 2021 and folded into Handbook 4000.1.
Two practical notes. That letter removed the older Early Start Letter and pre-approval requirements and consolidated the financing requirements regardless of loan-to-value, so guidance you find from before 2021 may describe restrictions that no longer apply. And every one of those documents comes from the builder, not from you, which is why we ask early whether a builder has done FHA files before. Our guide to FHA loan help in Salt Lake City covers how the program works more broadly, and our comparison of conventional and FHA lifetime cost is worth reading before you assume FHA is the cheaper route here.
Most Riverton and Herriman buyers purchase a finished or nearly finished home from a production builder, and that is an ordinary purchase loan with the construction-specific documentation described above. If instead you are financing the build itself, the structure changes.
Construction-to-permanent financing replaces interim construction money with a long-term mortgage, and it comes in two shapes. A single-closing transaction closes once, up front, and converts to permanent financing when the house is done. A two-closing transaction closes the construction loan first and the permanent loan separately afterward, which means qualifying twice.
On a single-closing purchase, Fannie Mae's guidelines set the loan-to-value against the lesser of two numbers: the purchase price, meaning the cost of construction plus the sales price of the lot, or the as-completed appraised value. Whichever is lower governs. If your build comes in over the appraisal, that difference is yours to cover in cash.
The construction period is also capped. No single period may exceed 12 months and the total may not exceed 18 months, and Fannie Mae states that exceptions to those periods will not be granted. On a market where infrastructure timelines and material availability can move a completion date, that ceiling is worth knowing before you plan around a schedule.
A resale closes in a month. A build can run three quarters of a year, and two things go stale in that window.
The first is your rate lock. Standard locks are written for resale timelines, and a build usually needs an extended lock, which is priced differently, or a float-down structure, or a decision to lock later and carry the market risk in between. There is no version of this where someone can promise you what rates will do. What we can do is lay out what each approach costs and what each one exposes you to. Our guide to rate lock strategy covers the tradeoff, and our 2026 mortgage rates guide covers what actually moves them.
The second is your file. On a single-closing construction-to-permanent loan, updated income, employment, and credit documents generally need to be no more than four months old at conversion, with a narrow exception that can stretch that to 18 months when specific conditions were met at the original closing. Practically, that means the things a lender tells every buyer become genuinely load-bearing over a long build. Do not change jobs, do not open new credit, do not finance the furniture before you close, and do not move large sums between accounts without telling us first. On a 30 day resale those warnings are almost theoretical. On a nine month build they are not.
Nearly every production builder in the southwest valley has an affiliated or preferred lender, and nearly every one attaches an incentive to using them. Those incentives can be real money and are worth taking seriously. They are also governed by rules that most buyers have never heard of.
Under federal law, when a builder refers you to an affiliated settlement service provider, it must give you a written Affiliated Business Arrangement Disclosure Statement explaining the ownership relationship and the estimated charge or range of charges. And under 12 CFR 1024.15, the party making the referral generally may not require you to use that provider, with narrow exceptions such as a lender selecting an attorney, credit reporting agency, or appraiser to represent the lender's own interests.
Offering a discount is not the same as requiring use. The regulation is explicit that packages and discounts for buying multiple settlement services do not by themselves constitute required use, provided the package is optional to the purchaser, the discount is a true discount below prices otherwise generally available, and it is not made up by higher costs elsewhere in the settlement process. That last clause is the whole test in practice. An incentive that is funded by a higher rate, higher fees, or an inflated base price is not the savings it appears to be.
So take the incentive seriously and price it honestly. Get the builder's lender's Loan Estimate, get ours, and compare them line by line over the years you expect to hold the home rather than at closing alone. Sometimes the builder's offer wins outright. Sometimes it does not once the rate is in the math. Either way you should see both, and our guide to comparing mortgage quotes shows how to line them up. For how incentives fit alongside a low down payment, our guide to buying a new build with little down covers that side in depth.
A few items in a southwest valley purchase are worth settling at the address rather than assuming from the subdivision brochure.
On that corridor point, it is worth knowing what is coming. UDOT ran nightly closures between 13400 South in Riverton and Porter Rockwell Boulevard in Herriman through this past summer, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., repaving the original 2012 pavement ahead of larger work. The larger work is a conversion of the highway to a freeway between Porter Rockwell Boulevard and Old Bingham Highway in West Jordan, adding two general purpose lanes in each direction within the existing median along with 25 new bridges. UDOT expects that construction to begin in 2027. If you are buying near the corridor, that is a multi-year condition to plan around and, eventually, a genuine improvement to how this side of the valley connects.
When we help a buyer plan a new-build purchase out here, we run the same order every time.
If you are early in the process, the first-time homebuyer roadmap lays out the full path. If savings are the constraint, start with qualifying to buy with little or nothing down and our guide to how much down payment you actually need. Assistance is worth checking early, and our overview of Utah Housing Corporation loans plus the reminder that assistance is usually repaid rather than granted will keep the expectations right. Still comparing neighborhoods? Our South Jordan and Daybreak guide covers the master-planned option next door, our West Jordan guide covers the affordable west side, and our Sandy guide covers the move-up side of the valley.
Both cities are in Salt Lake County, so both use the Salt Lake County figures. The 2026 conforming loan limit for a one unit home is 832,750 dollars, set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The 2026 FHA limit for a one unit home is 637,100 dollars, published separately by HUD. They come from different agencies and are not interchangeable, and the limits apply to the loan amount rather than the purchase price.
Because Salt Lake County values property as it existed on January 1. If your home was an unfinished lot on that date, the value on the roll for that year generally reflects the lot, and the completed house appears on the next January 1 valuation, which you first see on a Notice of Valuation in July and first pay in November. The county's published calendar has no mid-year supplemental bill to bridge the gap, so if your escrow was funded on the lot figure, the correction shows up all at once as a higher payment plus a shortage. Confirm the specifics for your parcel with the county.
Yes, subject to the loan amount fitting under the 637,100 dollar Salt Lake County FHA ceiling and to the property meeting FHA requirements. FHA sorts new construction into proposed construction, under construction, and existing less than one year, and each carries its own inspection path plus builder documentation including form HUD-92541 and form HUD-92544. The practical question is usually whether your builder has completed FHA files before, because that paperwork comes from them rather than from you.
Generally no. Federal rules require a written Affiliated Business Arrangement Disclosure when a builder refers you to an affiliated provider, and they prohibit requiring you to use that provider outside narrow exceptions. Offering an incentive is not the same as requiring use, and a discount is permitted so long as it is optional, is a true discount below prices otherwise generally available, and is not made up by higher costs elsewhere in the settlement process. Get both Loan Estimates and compare them over your holding period.
On a single-closing construction-to-permanent loan, Fannie Mae limits any single construction period to 12 months and the total to 18 months, and states that exceptions to those periods will not be granted. Updated income, employment, and credit documents generally need to be no more than four months old at conversion, with a narrow exception that can extend that when specific conditions were met at the original closing. On a long build, keeping your credit and employment steady is not boilerplate advice.
Usually, yes. The Utah Division of Real Estate's list of state-approved forms does not include a new-construction purchase contract, so builder purchases commonly run on the builder's own agreement or a separate industry form. That means the financing deadlines, earnest money terms, and contingency structure you may have read about on the standard resale contract are not automatically the ones you are signing. Read those terms specifically, and involve your agent and, where the stakes warrant it, an attorney.
Every dream deserves a dream team. If you are weighing Riverton and Herriman home loans on a new build, we will start from a payment you are comfortable with, set the program before you reach the design center, plan the rate lock around a realistic completion date, price the builder incentive against a second Loan Estimate, and put the completed-value tax number into the math from the beginning. Then you buy in the southwest valley with a plan instead of a surprise in year two.
Sharla Ellis, Producing Branch Manager · NMLS #209040
2150 South 1300 East, Suite 150, Salt Lake City, UT 84106
Phone: (801) 580-1861
Email: [email protected]
Visit sharlaellis.com to start a conversation.
This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute a commitment to lend. Loan approval is subject to underwriting and to a full review of credit, income, assets, and property eligibility. Program guidelines, down payment minimums, income limits, purchase price limits, reserve requirements, condominium and project eligibility, construction-to-permanent loan terms and construction period limits, document age requirements, appraisal outcomes, inspection and builder documentation requirements, rate lock availability and extension pricing, and down payment assistance terms vary by program, are administered by third parties, and are subject to change without notice. Down payment assistance is not a grant unless the administering program states otherwise. Loan limit figures reflect published 2026 amounts for Salt Lake County, Utah, and differ by county and by program. Property tax assessment practice, valuation dates, residential exemption eligibility, escrow analysis outcomes, homeowners insurance pricing and availability, association and project status, permit and inspection records, school attendance boundaries, and transportation project schedules are determined by third parties or by local and state government and should be confirmed for any specific property. Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Sharla Ellis, NMLS #209040, Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, Company NMLS #2289. Equal Housing Opportunity.