Every May, Parade of Homes visitors work their way through finished houses in Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties. They open pantry doors, look up at ceiling details, and stand at the back slider trying to picture a Saturday on the lanai. Nobody on that tour sees the year that came before the open house.

That year is where most of a custom home’s story lives. Permit packages go back and forth with the county. Selections get finalized, revised, and finalized again. A cabinet delivery gets moved because a tropical system is tracking toward the coast. If you’re comparing one Orlando custom home builder against another, the finished rooms tell you about taste and finish work, while the year behind them tells you what living through the process will feel like.

Once a year, the Greater Orlando Builders Association puts names to some of that work.

A Program With Marketing Roots

GOBA’s Major Achievement Awards, known around the local industry as the MAJORS, go back to 1983. The association introduced them that year as the MAME Awards, short for Major Achievements in Marketing Excellence, to honor the best work in sales, marketing, and design. The program runs through GOBA’s Sales & Marketing Council, a group inside the association built around its members’ professional growth and community involvement, with an emphasis on ethics and professionalism.

Most MAJORS categories are competitive and judged. Builders and associate members enter logos, brochures, social media programs, virtual tours, and interior design work sorted by square footage. The sales awards carry hard thresholds. A builder member’s nominee for Salesperson of the Year needs at least $5 million in closings, backed by an internal closing report signed by the builder and a financial officer, and the individual Million Dollar Circle uses the same $5 million floor. For 2026, the eligibility window covered July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026.

So a large share of the evening measures how well a company markets and sells homes. Three categories measure something different.

Three Awards That Start With a Nomination

The Shining Star Award, the Golden Hammer Award, and the Customer Service Award belong to a separate group. GOBA lists them as non-judged individual achievement categories: a builder or associate member nominates the candidate, submits a photo and an entry form, and every nominee is recognized.

That structure changes what the honor means. No panel ranks these nominees against each other. The recognition begins with someone in the industry deciding that a specific person carried enough of the load over the past twelve months to be named in front of the region’s builders, trades, and suppliers. It says something about the person. It also says something about the company that works alongside them every day.

This year, three members of the Hardwick General Contracting team were honored at GOBA’s masquerade-themed MAJORS gala, one in each of those categories.

A Shining Star for the Office Side of the Build

GOBA describes the Shining Star as recognition for a “back office” employee whose service to their organization over the past year stood out. Nicole received it.

The back office of a custom home builder is easy to overlook and hard to replace. On a single custom home, it’s usually where change orders get written up and signed, where lender draw requests come together, where permit documents get tracked between the building department and the design team, and where trade schedules get rebuilt after a delay. Central Florida adds a layer of its own. A project in Orange County and another in Lake or Seminole will move through different building departments with different submittal habits and review timelines, and someone has to keep both straight.

Homeowners mostly feel this work through its absence. A change order that arrives with clear pricing before the work starts, instead of surfacing on a later invoice, is back office work. So is the phone call letting you know a delivery moved before you drive out to the lot expecting to see it.

The Golden Hammer and the Field

The Golden Hammer goes to a company or individual involved in the building process who delivered excellent service to the organization during the year. Chad was this year’s recipient from the Hardwick team.

The name fits the work. Field progress on a custom home in this region runs on a calendar the weather partly writes. Hurricane season stretches from June through November, summer storms can end a roofing day by mid-afternoon, and humidity affects when interior trim and cabinetry can go in without moving later. Keeping trades sequenced through all of that, while holding quality steady, is the kind of effort the Golden Hammer exists to notice.

There’s a practical reading for homeowners here too. An award built around service to the organization means the people closest to someone’s work trust it. That trust usually shows up on the jobsite in the details, though not always in ways a homeowner can spot during a weekly walk-through.

The Customer Service Award and the Years After Move-In

The Customer Service Award recognizes a company or employee in the customer experience process who gave excellent service to the homebuyer over the past year. GOBA notes that the nominee could be someone rated as a top consumer service individual within their company. Bryan received it.

Of the three categories, this one points most directly at the homeowner. Service on a custom home doesn’t stop at the final walkthrough. A new house in Central Florida goes through its first full swing of wet and dry seasons, and that first year tends to bring seasonal settling adjustments, a door that needs attention after the humidity shifts, and warranty questions that only come up once a family has lived in the space for a while. How a builder handles those calls is one of the clearest signs of whether it sees a home as a finished sale or a thirty-year relationship.

What This Means When You’re Interviewing Builders

Awards are one input among many, and nobody should choose a builder from a trophy shelf. These three categories do point toward some useful questions for any builder interview.

Ask who your day-to-day contact in the office will be and how change orders get documented before work begins. Find out who runs the site, and how you’ll hear about schedule changes when a storm system shuts things down for a few days. The warranty conversation deserves the most attention and usually gets the least. Who comes back to the house during the first year, and what does that follow-up visit cover?

Check the basics as well. A contractor’s state license can be confirmed through the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Membership in a local builders association like GOBA connects a company to the Florida Home Builders Association and the broader federation behind it, which suggests involvement in the industry’s education and advocacy work beyond a single project list.

Recognition From the Inside

Hardwick General Contracting has a history with GOBA’s awards. Principal Greg Hardwick was named the association’s Remodeler of the Year in 2017, 2018, and 2020. He was also the Florida Home Builders Association’s Remodeler of the Year recipient in 2019. Those honors went to the company’s leader, while this year’s three went to people working in the office, in the field, and with homeowners after the keys are handed over.

Most of a builder’s reputation gets earned in months nobody tours, so it’s worth noticing when an industry association sets aside part of an evening for that work. Congratulations to Nicole, Chad, and Bryan.

If you’re looking for luxury custom home builders in the Orlando area, keep Hardwick General Contracting in mind. Their team has spent more than two decades building sustainable, high-performance custom homes for Central Florida homeowners, with a personalized approach and a habit of treating every project like it’s their own family’s home. Learn more at hardwickgc.com.