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

Three OKC-metro 'vote for something' programs, and only one of them is voting on a house

Oklahoma City runs at least three separate public-vote programs at once, and mixing them up costs a campaign real clicks. Central Oklahoma Home Builders Association's Parade of Homes People's Choice award asks the public to pick a favorite among 100+ entered homes across seven cities. Oklahoma Gazette's Best of OKC and 405 Magazine's Best of 405 both ask readers to pick favorite local businesses across many separate categories. Different organizer. Different ballot. A different thing entirely being judged.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A builder who assumes the Parade of Homes ballot works like a business readers' poll, one big category list, a single submit button, will be surprised by how differently this program is actually built.

Only the Parade of Homes program gets judged twice: once by COHBA's own industry panel across its category awards, and once by the public through the People's Choice vote that runs alongside those judged categories. Neither the Gazette's ballot nor 405 Magazine's works that way; both are reader-only decisions from the start. See how those two business polls run their own mechanics in the Best of OKC (Oklahoma Gazette) guide and the 405 Magazine Best of 405 guide.

Why does a builder chase People's Choice instead of just a judged category?

A judged Parade of Homes award tells other builders and industry insiders something. A People's Choice win tells a prospective buyer something different: that real visitors who walked through dozens of competing houses picked this one. For a builder selling to homeowners, not to other contractors, that distinction is most of the point of entering at all.

Authentic Custom Homes took home 14 awards across the 2025 Parade of Homes cycle — a genuinely large haul for one builder in a single year. What isn't confirmed on the record checked for this guide is whether the People's Choice category specifically sat among those 14; COHBA's public materials name the total but not a category-by-category breakdown, so a builder citing that number should be precise about what it actually covers.

Two editions a year changes the timing math

COHBA ran both a spring and a fall Parade of Homes in 2025. Two windows a year, not one, means a builder gets two separate chances to enter a completed home and two separate shots at the People's Choice vote, rather than waiting a full year between attempts the way a once-a-year program forces.

That cadence also resets the campaign math twice. A strong spring showing doesn't carry into the fall tour automatically. Each edition opens its own homes and, presumably, its own vote.

What's actually confirmed about the 2025 Parade of Homes OKC cycle

100+ homes. Seven cities. Free admission. Those three facts anchor everything else here, and they're worth stating plainly before anything gets layered on top.

What that table doesn't answer: an exact People's Choice vote count, a per-home award breakdown, or a fixed close date for the current cycle's ballot. Rather than guess at numbers COHBA hasn't published in the record checked here, treat cohba.org/parade-of-homes and paradeofhomesok.com as the live sources once a cycle opens.

Fourteen awards in one year, spread across whatever mix of judged and voted categories COHBA runs, still says something concrete: a builder can compete seriously across multiple categories in the same cycle, not chase just a single trophy. Seven cities' worth of builders enter the same 100-plus-home field each edition, so a multi-award result like that stands out precisely because most entrants don't manage it.

cohba.org tells the story; paradeofhomesok.com runs the tour

Two domains, two jobs. cohba.org/parade-of-homes sits on the association's main site and works as the explainer: what Parade of Homes is, why COHBA runs it, background on the awards program overall. paradeofhomesok.com is the event's own site, built for the actual tour: the current cycle's entered homes, their addresses, and, presumably, wherever the People's Choice ballot itself lives.

A search for the program by name can surface either domain depending on the query. Bookmark the wrong one and a supporter ends up reading background instead of finding the home they meant to vote for.

People's Choice sits apart from the judged categories

COHBA's industry judges evaluate entered homes under the program's own judging criteria, the way most trade association awards work. People's Choice runs on a separate track — whoever the public actually picks, regardless of what the judges decided in their own categories. A home could win big with the judges and place modestly in People's Choice, or the reverse; nothing in the confirmed record ties the two outcomes together.

What isn't documented here is the exact mechanism behind that public pick: an online gallery vote, an in-home ballot card, a QR code posted at each entered property, or some mix that changes by season. A builder building a real campaign around this award should confirm the live format on paradeofhomesok.com before promising supporters one specific way to vote.

Building a real Edmond-to-Mustang campaign around one entered home

Seven cities is a lot of ground for one builder's customer list to cover alone. Edmond and north Oklahoma City draw one kind of buyer; Moore and Norman skew closer to the university and the I-35 corridor; Yukon, Choctaw, and Mustang round out the metro's newer-construction suburbs on the west and east sides. A builder entering a home in Mustang isn't necessarily reaching the same past-client list that would respond to a Norman entry.

That geography argues for a narrow, honest campaign over a broad one. Past clients who actually bought a home from this builder, subcontractors and trade partners who know the work firsthand, real visitors who walked the property during the open tour dates: that's the list worth reaching for a People's Choice push. A generic blast to a purchased email list does little for credibility in an industry where word travels between the same builders, suppliers, and real estate agents fast.

Fabricated accounts or automated voting tools are a particularly bad trade here — a home builder's business depends on referrals and repeat trust across all seven cities, not just one cycle's placement. A People's Choice result that later looks manipulated does more damage to that reputation than a modest, honest showing ever would. Is buying votes legal covers the general line between legitimate promotion and what risks a vote getting pulled, and how online contest votes work lays out the mechanics of a compliant push.

For the broader mechanics of running an award-style campaign, award-style vote campaigns covers ground that applies directly to a judged-plus-voted program like this one, and the general contest vote campaign guide is useful for weighing how much of a push a single home entry deserves against the cost of running it. Oklahoma also runs sports-side fan votes with no connection to any home-building award: the 2 News Oklahoma Player of the Week and the Oklahoma High School Athlete of the Week both cover prep athletics, not builders. The Oklahoma contest hub lists the state's full slate of active programs.