How to read this, and what the numbers are not.
“People sampled” is how many individuals we observed engaging with that company’s
posts during one pass, and it was capped at 80 per company. Ten companies hit exactly that
cap, which means the number is a ceiling we set, not a measure of how popular anybody is.
Sorting by it would be a leaderboard that is simply false, so companies are listed
alphabetically within each role. We publish the method rather than a ranking because a ranking
we cannot stand behind is worse than none.
National production builders
The volume builders. They buy land, entitle it, build to a small number of repeated plans, and sell through their own sales centres. Between them they account for a large share of new homes sold in the United States.
Texas and Austin builders
Regional and local builders working the same market we are in. Several are Austin-specific, which is why they matter more to us than their national size would suggest.
Cottonwood Custom Builders
not yet sampled
LinkedIn →Architecture practices
Where a custom home starts. In Austin this is a distinct and visible group, and the work they publish is some of the most engaged-with content in the whole sector.
Alterstudio Architecture
19 people sampled
LinkedIn →Matt Fajkus Architecture
59 people sampled
LinkedIn →Michael Hsu Office of Architecture
76 people sampled
LinkedIn →Pursley Dixon Architecture
not yet sampled
LinkedIn →Factory and off-site building
Building the house somewhere other than the site. A small share of the market and an outsized share of the conversation about where the industry is going.
Software, tools and platforms
What the builders and trades actually run on — estimating, drawing, project management, capture and lead generation. This is the layer a marketing engine sits closest to.
Codes, standards and certification
The rules a house has to satisfy and the programmes that certify it went beyond them. Dry, and decisive — they set what can be built and what can be claimed in marketing.
Austin Energy Green Building
48 people sampled
LinkedIn →DOE Zero Energy Ready Home
not yet sampled
LinkedIn →International Code Council (ICC)
not yet sampled
LinkedIn →Suppliers and building products
Found in the data rather than chosen from a list. These are the employers that turned up repeatedly in the job titles of people engaging with builder posts, which is a narrow but honest way to identify who is actually in this market. It is not a complete supplier directory and does not pretend to be one.
Airtite Products
not yet sampled
no page trackedBuilders FirstSource
not yet sampled
no page trackedJames Hardie Building Products
not yet sampled
no page trackedWisenbaker Builder Services
not yet sampled
no page trackedWhere buyers search — and our own place in this
The buyer-facing end of the chain. Listed here rather than hidden because one of them is ours, and a directory that quietly includes its own author without saying so is the kind of thing this industry has too much of.
Associations, data and local government
Where the industry organises itself, argues its case, and gets its numbers. Also where a builder's local permissions actually come from.
City of Austin Development Services Department
4 people sampled
LinkedIn →Home Builders Association of Greater Austin
8 people sampled
LinkedIn →National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)
43 people sampled
LinkedIn →Texas Association of Builders
30 people sampled
LinkedIn →Unlock MLS / Austin Board of REALTORS
13 people sampled
LinkedIn →US Census - New Residential Construction
6 people sampled
LinkedIn →One uncomfortable thing the data says. Of the 2,160 people we
observed engaging with these companies’ posts, roughly 11% work for one of the
companies listed on this page. Most engagement on a builder’s post is that builder’s
own staff and their competitors’ staff — not buyers, and not trades looking for work.
That matters, because an outreach list built from raw engagement would be mostly colleagues.
We publish it because it is the sort of finding a vendor normally keeps quiet, and because it is
the reason the supplier list above is short and honest rather than long and invented.
Something missing, or something wrong? This is a working map rather
than a finished one, and the fastest way it improves is somebody in the industry telling us what
we have misplaced. Corrections are welcome and we would rather be corrected than tidy.
Tell us what we got wrong