Compromise on when buying a used home. In general if you're going to want to do any kind of serious renovations on the home its far cheaper short term to build to your specs than to renovate to your specs. If you're comparing plainly renovating a bathroom versus building your dream bathroom with all kinds of custom stuff in a new home, then it's comparing apples to pineapples.

The thing that would make a new home more expensive (besides a ton of customizations) is having to deal with a ton of contractors who engage happily in price gouging, late delivery, unfinished work, etc, whereas you might do relatively little to make a used home updated and do a bunch of that stuff yourself. Example: if your electrical/wiring contractor screws you, you could be paying to get that same work twice, whereas you're unlikely to do any wiring in a used home.