Vote for Your Favorite Home | WNC Parade of Homes 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the WNC Parade of Homes People's Choice vote is

The WNC Parade of Homes is the fall home tour run by the Builders Association of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the builders association serving the Asheville, Hendersonville and Brevard area of western North Carolina. Alongside the tour itself, the association opens a public vote on its own website so visitors can crown a People's Choice winner, which the ballot labels the Viewers Choice Award. The page title says it plainly: vote for your favorite home.

Unlike most of the reader-driven ballots covered on this site, this one is not hosted on a contest platform. The form lives at wncparadeofhomes.com/vote, on the organizer's own domain, and the copyright line on the site reads Asheville Home Builders Association. That matters for two reasons. First, there is no third-party platform layer between the voter and the ballot, so the rules a supporter sees are whatever the association prints on that page. Second, the ballot is tied to a physical tour of real homes, which shapes how the vote is framed: the association describes voting as quick, easy and open now, and any member of the public can take part.

The market context is distinctive too. The association operates in a mountain luxury market with strong builder competition, and the region's ongoing Hurricane Helene rebuild gives the parade a relevance that a routine trade showcase does not have. A People's Choice win here is a public endorsement from the very homeowners the builders serve.

The 2025 dates, and what the next cycle has not published

The 2025 parade was the 44th edition, and its dated timeline is unusually complete because the association published an entry packet for member builders. Entries opened with an early bird deadline of June 10, 2025, followed by a main entry deadline of June 24, a final entry deadline of July 29, and an extended deadline of August 4, 2025. The tour itself ran October 11 through 19, and the Viewers Choice vote, the public's award, ran Saturday, October 11 through Monday, October 13, the tour's first three days. The awards gala followed on October 17, before the tour even closed.

That compressed schedule is the fact builders most often miss. A home's People's Choice campaign lives or dies inside a three-day window that starts the same day the tour opens, not across the full nine days of the tour. The Viewers Choice Award is defined as going to the home that receives the most votes on the WNCParadeofHomes.com website during that window.

What the association has not published ahead of time is the ballot's contents: which homes appear in the Showcase Homes and Renewed Spaces groups for a given year only becomes visible when that year's form goes live, and the 2026 window dates have not been posted yet either. Anyone planning around the next edition should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes on the WNC Parade of Homes ballot

The mechanic is a plain online web form. A supporter opens wncparadeofhomes.com/vote, browses that year's entries, and makes a selection in each of two groups. The 2025 ballot printed the instruction directly: Viewers Choice, select one for Showcase Homes and one for Renewed Spaces. So a single visit registers a favorite newly built home and a favorite renovated one, and both selections count toward the award in their own group.

Eligibility is as open as public votes get. The association's material states that any member of the public can vote, and the ballot page markets the process as quick and easy with no mention of a sign-in step. Nothing on the available material describes a per-person cap on repeat visits or a daily return rule, so the two-selection structure is the only confirmed constraint a supporter can see.

Because the form lives on the association's own domain rather than inside a contest platform, there is no platform dashboard, no nominee profile page and no share button ecosystem around it. Support for a specific home has to be driven by the builder's own channels, pointing people at the ballot URL during the window. That is a different job from a newspaper readers' contest, where a nominee's name stays searchable for weeks, and it is why the three-day Viewers Choice window in 2025 mattered so much to the entries competing that fall.

How this ballot sits beside North Carolina's other public votes

North Carolina offers no shortage of public-vote programs, and most of them are media or community ballots rather than industry ones. Best of North Carolina covers the whole state, Charlotte Magazine Best of the Best Awards runs in the state's largest metro, and Daily Reflector Best Of Pitt County serves a eastern market. Community-level ballots include Fayetteville Community's Choice Awards, Best of Chowan County and Best of Haywood.

The WNC Parade of Homes vote differs from every one of those in three ways. The nominees are homes, not businesses or service categories, so a vote is an endorsement of a builder's craftsmanship rather than a customer-service reputation. The organizer is a trade association rather than a publisher, and the ballot lives on the association's own site instead of a media platform. And the vote is compressed into the opening days of a physical tour, where the newspaper-style ballots typically run nomination and voting rounds over weeks.

For a builder deciding where to invest outreach, that combination cuts both ways. The audience is smaller and geographically fixed to the Asheville, Hendersonville and Brevard tour footprint, but the voters are self-selected home tour visitors and locals with real building or renovation intent, and a People's Choice trophy carries weight with exactly that audience.

Strengthening support during the Viewers Choice window

Everything about this ballot rewards preparation done before October. The 2025 vote opened the same day the tour opened and closed after three days, so a builder who starts telling clients once the form is live has already spent most of the window. The practical sequence is simple: identify past clients and social followers in the Asheville, Hendersonville and Brevard area, tell them the exact dates, and ask for one specific selection in the Showcase Homes or Renewed Spaces group rather than a vague request to vote.

The two-selection structure also creates a natural partnership opportunity. A builder and a renovator competing in different groups can promote each other's entries without competing, since each supporter gets one pick in each group anyway. The association has published no policy on outside vote-getting efforts, so the safe assumption is that outreach to real supporters is fine and anything automated is not. For a fuller treatment of outreach that fits a short public window, see how to get more votes online, and for the boundary between earned support and purchased votes, our award-votes page sets out the general landscape without promising any outcome.