Wichita Area Builders Parade of Homes: How Voting Works & How to Win

Two Wichita ballots, one shared slice of domain name

votewichitaks.com. bestofwichitaks.com. Wichita Area Builders Association threads its Parade of Homes People's Choice vote through both addresses, and neither one belongs to WABA alone in the way a first-time visitor might assume. bestofwichitaks.com is also where The Wichita Eagle runs Best of Wichita, a 248-category readers-choice ballot that pulled in more than 634,000 votes in its 2025 edition. Two real programs, two different organizers, one shared piece of branding.

That overlap is worth untangling before anything else. A search for "vote Wichita" or "best of Wichita" can just as easily surface a newspaper's business-category ballot as it can a home builders' trade group's showcase-home vote. They aren't the same contest, they don't share a category list, and a vote cast on one has nothing to do with the other.

The Best of Wichita guide covers the Eagle's version in full. What follows here stays with WABA's home-tour vote specifically, the one measured in showcase houses, not storefronts.

What a Parade of Homes vote actually is, and what changed in Fall 2024

A Parade of Homes is a tour first, a ballot second. Area builders each finish out a new house, WABA lines them up as one event, and the public walks through more than 100 of them per event to see current design and construction work firsthand. That part of the format predates any online vote by years.

Fall 2024 is when the public fan-vote layer, People's Choice, entered the picture. Visitors touring the current slate of homes pick a favorite, and that pick registers through the votewichitaks.com and bestofwichitaks.com ecosystem rather than a single stand-alone form. wabahome.com, WABA's own site, anchors the broader Parade of Homes program, including whatever builder-side recognition runs alongside the public's pick. Beyond this one event, the Kansas contest hub lines up the state's other fan-vote programs for comparison.

What isn't published alongside those facts

No fixed per-visitor vote cap. No confirmed exact show dates for the next cycle. No public vote total from the Fall 2024 debut or any event since. Those gaps aren't a reason to guess; they're a reason to check wabahome.com or votewichitaks.com directly before a builder, or a homeowner, repeats a number nobody has actually published.

What's confirmed about the People's Choice vote, and what still needs a live check

More than 100 homes. One fall introduction date. Two linked web addresses. Nothing further than that is nailed down about this program right now, and stretching past it would mean guessing.

A builder citing a past People's Choice result has to be precise about it: name the event, and once a year is attached to a specific announcement WABA has actually made, that claim holds up. "Award-winning home" with nothing else behind it doesn't, not from what's confirmed here. The same caution applies to a homeowner shopping builders off a Parade tour. Ask which specific award, from which specific event, before taking a flyer's claim at face value.

Why the Parade of Homes vote doesn't look like Kansas's other fan-vote programs

Kansas runs several fan-vote programs that have nothing to do with each other beyond sharing a state line. Best of Johnson County and Best of KC (Kansas City Magazine) both run general business readers-choice ballots roughly two hundred miles northeast, in the Kansas City metro, covering restaurants, retailers, and service providers across dozens or hundreds of categories. Neither has any connection to a builder or a showcase home.

On the sports side, Catchy Awards Kansas High School Athletics runs a statewide prep-sports fan vote through KWCH 12, and ESPN Wichita High School Athlete of the Week runs a weekly Wichita-market version of the same idea, honoring student athletes rather than businesses or homes. Both are broadcaster programs, not builder-association ones, and both vote on athletic performance, something the Parade of Homes vote never touches.

WABA's People's Choice sits in none of those categories. It isn't a business ballot, so Overland Park's or Olathe's category lists don't apply here. It isn't a sports poll either. It's a vote on a physical structure a builder finished and opened for a public walkthrough, tied to one association's own event calendar rather than a newspaper's or a broadcaster's. A Wichita-area builder weighing a Parade of Homes entry against a Best of Wichita business-category nomination is really choosing between two different audiences, not two versions of the same contest.

Getting real votes for a home on the Parade tour

A legitimate push for a Parade of Homes entry starts with the people who already walked through the house: past clients, subcontractors, neighbors on the same street. Point them at the specific vote destination in the votewichitaks.com / bestofwichitaks.com ecosystem, not a vague mention of the Parade. A visitor who has to search for the right page may not bother finishing the click.

A builder can also lean on the tour traffic itself. Anyone who actually walks through a Parade of Homes entry is a warmer prospect for a People's Choice vote than a cold social post, since they've already seen the kitchen, the finishes, the yard. Signage inside the home pointing to the vote link, mentioned once by whoever staffs the open house, does more than a generic reminder posted after the fact.

What doesn't hold up: manufactured accounts or scripted voting. WABA is a trade association its members work with year after year; a builder caught inflating a People's Choice result risks more than one bad headline, it risks the next referral inside a small professional community. Award-style vote campaigns covers the general mechanics of running a legitimate push like this one, and is buying votes legal is worth reading before committing budget to any vote-driving effort. For the broader mechanics behind online contest voting, see how online contest votes work.