Twin Cities Parade of Homes People's Choice: How Voting Works & How to Win

364 homes, two seasons a year, and a 77-year run behind it

Seventy-seven. That's how many consecutive years the Twin Cities Parade of Homes had run by its 2025 season. Three hundred sixty-four is how many homes went into that single season alone. Housing First Minnesota, operating under its longtime BATC name, points to that scale when it calls this the largest Parade of Homes in the United States, and the raw entry count carries more weight than the claim on its own would.

Numbers like that reset what a first-time visitor to paradeofhomes.org should expect walking in. This isn't a ten-home regional showcase with one obvious page to bookmark and forget about. It runs twice a year, spring and fall, and each cycle fields its own list of entered homes spread across the Twin Cities metro.

What's missing from that table on purpose: an exact vote count for any single home, a close date that repeats identically every season, a published per-visitor cap. Those shift by season, so paradeofhomes.org itself, not a screenshot from a prior cycle, is the only source worth trusting once a specific spring or fall event goes live. The Minnesota contest hub tracks the state's other public-vote programs for anyone comparing notes.

Where a builder-run Parade splits from Minnesota's newspaper ballots

Minnesota already runs two other well-documented best-of programs tracked on this site, and neither works the way the Twin Cities Parade of Homes does.

A reader can back a restaurant on either newspaper ballot from memory alone, no visit required that day. A Parade of Homes voter is judging one specific finished house, built this season, sitting in one specific community. Different ask entirely. A builder weighing a Parade push against a broader business award should plan the two separately rather than reusing one reminder message for both.

The state's sport fan-vote polls sit even further outside this. Minnesota also runs the season-long Minnesota High School Athlete of the Week and the college-hockey Hobey Baker Award Fan Vote, both built for an audience that has nothing to do with touring a new-construction home.

People's Choice and the Reggie Awards run on separate tracks

Two names circle this Parade, and they don't mean the same thing. People's Choice is the public side, built on visitor turnout. The Reggie Awards sit apart from it entirely, a recognition Housing First Minnesota presents on its own terms, and the 2026 Spring season is where Robert Thomas Homes picked up two of them.

What's confirmed here, and what still needs checking

Both tracks existing is confirmed. So is the twice-yearly cadence and the 364-home 2025 count. What isn't confirmed anywhere in the facts available for this guide is the mechanical detail underneath People's Choice: whether a vote gets cast online, through an event app, or on a paper ballot at the home itself, and what per-visitor limit, if any, applies.

Saying plainly what isn't confirmed beats guessing at a ballot format nobody here can verify. Treat paradeofhomes.org's current materials, not a description written for an earlier season, as the actual source once a specific cycle opens.

364 homes don't sit downtown. Here's where they actually are.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul anchor the metro on a map, but a Parade this size doesn't cluster in either city center. Most of the new construction runs through the ring of building suburbs around both, Woodbury, Maple Grove, Lakeville, Blaine, Eden Prairie, and Plymouth among them, where open land for a whole season's worth of new model homes still exists.

A single citywide push misses most of the actual field

A campaign aimed only at Minneapolis skips over most of where the entered homes physically stand. A builder with an entry in Lakeville is realistically drawing on Lakeville's own buyer traffic and word of mouth first; a metro-wide audience that has to drive out for a tour is a smaller and slower slice of turnout by comparison.

That geography also explains the sheer count. A metro building at this pace, spread across this many suburbs, produces more finished, tourable inventory in one spring or fall window than a single-city Parade could ever field. The Minnesota's Best guide covers how a similar statewide breadth plays out for the Star Tribune's business ballot, for anyone comparing the two kinds of scale.

Building a real push around a recognition this size

Robert Thomas Homes didn't land a 12th consecutive top-25 mention from one loud season. That kind of streak comes from showing up reliably, spring and fall, cycle after cycle, and letting real buyers and real past clients keep noticing on their own.

The same logic holds for People's Choice turnout on any single entered home. Real prospective buyers. Real past clients who'd tour the home anyway, reminded at the right moment. Fake accounts or automated tools put more at risk than a disqualification here; the Twin Cities building industry is small enough that an inflated claim gets noticed fast by competing builders and Housing First Minnesota members alike. See is buying votes legal before committing budget to any campaign tied to a specific recognition claim.

Specifics hold up better than a broad announcement. Naming the exact community, the exact season, and the exact recognition, something like "People's Choice entry, Woodbury, Spring 2026," points to something a reader can actually check. A bare "award-winning builder" line with no season attached doesn't. How online contest votes work covers the general mechanics behind a legitimate turnout push, and pricing covers what that kind of support actually costs.