Top Minnesota Home Builders of 2026: Ranked by Verifiable Credentials

Published and reviewed 2026-08-06

What this ranking is, and what it is not

This is not a list of the “best” home builders in Minnesota. Nobody can produce that list honestly. Build quality is judged one house at a time, and the things that matter most to a particular family — how a builder communicates, whether they hit a date, what happens when something goes wrong two winters later — do not exist in any public dataset.

What we can do is answer a narrower question, and answer it precisely:

Which Minnesota builders have the most credentials a buyer can independently check?

That is the entire methodology. Every builder below ranks where it does because of facts we retrieved from a primary source, recorded with the URL we found it at and the date we retrieved it, and can show you.

The method, stated plainly

In August 2026 we researched all 145 builders in our directory, one at a time, against a fixed nine-field specification. For this ranking we counted three things per builder:

Dated awards. An award only counts if we found a year attached to it. “Award-winning” with no year, no awarding organization, or no date does not count — and a surprising number of builder websites publish exactly that.
Confirmed Parade of Homes years. Each year we could confirm from a primary source counts once.
Trade association memberships. Housing First Minnesota, NARI, NAHB, NKBA, Green Path, and similar, where membership was stated or listed.

The three are added together with equal weight. We did not invent multipliers to make one category count more than another, because we have no defensible basis for saying a NARI Contractor of the Year is worth 1.6 Parade appearances.

Ties are broken by the number of dated awards, then alphabetically. One tie mattered: five builders finished on 12 credentials, and the tenth spot went to the one with the most dated awards among them. That is disclosed rather than hidden.

What this method rewards, and what it misses

Be clear-eyed about the shape of this:

It rewards builders who document and publish. A firm that has won awards for thirty years but never listed them with dates will rank low here. That is a limitation of the method, not a judgment of the builder.
It rewards firms that enter competitions. Plenty of excellent builders never enter the Parade of Homes or submit work for awards. They cannot rank on a credential count.
It does not measure volume, price, or quality. A builder finishing eight houses a year can outrank one finishing eight hundred.
It counts remodelers alongside new-home builders. Both appear in our directory and both accumulate the same kinds of credentials.
It does not incorporate regulatory history. This ranking counts published credentials only. We verify that each builder’s Minnesota licence number exists in the Department of Labor and Industry’s public records, but we did not score licence-enforcement history, and a builder’s presence on this list — or their position on it — is not a statement about their regulatory record. If that history matters to your decision, and it should, look the licence up yourself at the DLI’s licence lookup.
Award entries are sometimes grouped. Where a builder listed, say, eleven NARI wins across a decade on one page, our data records that as one entry with the years enumerated. So the count is conservative for the most decorated firms.

If you want the underlying facts rather than the ranking, every builder profile on this site now carries its sourced credentials with the source link and retrieval date attached.

The ten

1. Great Northern Builders — 18 credentials

Eagan, founded 2009. Eight dated awards, six confirmed Parade years (2019 through 2024), four memberships. Housing First Minnesota gave it Remodeler of Merit Awards in every year from 2019 to 2024, and NARI Minnesota added three Contractor of the Year awards in 2021. It holds the NAHB Certified Aging-In-Place Specialist designation.

2. Plekkenpol Builders — 17 credentials

Bloomington, founded 1970. The broadest association footprint we found anywhere in the directory — eight, including Housing First Minnesota, NARI, NAHB, NKBA, and ASID — plus six straight years in the Remodelers Showcase from 2021 to 2026. Its founder is a past president of Housing First Minnesota and an NAHB Life Director, and the City of Bloomington proclaimed a day in his name in 2016.

3. John Kraemer & Sons — 16 credentials

Edina, started 1978. Eleven dated awards, the most of any builder in the directory. Housing First Minnesota has named it Builder of the Year five times, in 1999, 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2023. Its remodels have taken twelve NARI Contractor of the Year awards between 2016 and 2022, including national Best of Show twice.

4. Sustainable 9 Design + Build — 16 credentials

Minneapolis. Nine memberships and certifications, all of them about building performance: DOE Zero Energy Ready Home, ENERGY STAR, LEED, PHIUS Passive House, EPA Indoor airPLUS, HERS, and MN Green Path Leadership among them. The U.S. Department of Energy gave it a Housing Innovation Award in 2020 after an honorable mention in 2019.

5. Boyer Building Corporation — 15 credentials

Minnetonka, founded 1949 — a four-generation family firm. Ten dated awards spanning both building and remodeling, including Star Tribune Minnesota’s Best Gold for custom home builder in 2026, NARI-MN gold awards in 2023 and 2025, and Housing First Minnesota ROMA awards in 2021 and 2025. It also holds a Reggie Award of Excellence.

6. Stonewood — 15 credentials

Wayzata. The family lineage dates to 1947; the Stonewood name to 1993. Eight confirmed Parade and Artisan Home Tour seasons between 2014 and 2025 — the longest tour record among firms in this top ten — including Dream Homes in Edina in 2014 and Minnetrista in 2019 and 2021.

7. Robert Thomas Homes — 14 credentials

Lakeville. Six consecutive Parade years from 2021 through 2026 and Reggie Awards in both the 2026 Spring Parade and January 2025. RESNET recognized it in 2020 for an average HERS Index under 50, and Housing First Minnesota gave it a Green Path Leadership Award in 2019.

8. Creative Homes — 13 credentials

Woodbury, founded 2012. Eight dated awards including Reggie Awards in 2017, 2023, and 2024, the National Housing Quality Award in 2021, and Inc. 5000 placements in 2019 and 2020. It also carries Best Places to Work honors from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal in 2024 and 2025.

9. Semler Homes — 13 credentials

Cambridge, founded 1981. The longest Parade record we found anywhere: eleven Parade years and twelve Reggie Awards, starting in 1991 and 1992, again in 1996, then almost every year from 2013 through 2021.

10. Custom One — 12 credentials

Woodbury. Reached tenth on the tiebreak, with eight dated awards — the most among the five builders tied at twelve. NARI Minnesota named it Remodeler of the Year in both 2024 and 2025, and Housing First Minnesota gave it Reggie Awards in 2021 and 2022 and a ROMA in 2025.

Tied at twelve credentials and not shown above, in dated-award order: AMEK Design + Build, Murphy Bros. Design Build Remodel, Black Dog Homes, Crystal Kitchen + Bath, and Style & Structure. On a different tiebreak any of them could have taken the tenth spot.

Where the numbers came from

Every fact behind this ranking was retrieved on 6 August 2026, primarily from the builders’ own websites, the Housing First Minnesota newsroom, association member directories, and awarding organizations’ published winner lists.

Two rules governed what we recorded. A builder’s own site is authoritative for its own claims, but a third-party directory is not authoritative for a founding year or a price. And a fact we could not source was left empty rather than guessed at — across 145 builders, warranty terms were unsourceable for 98 of them and a founding year for 68. Those gaps are honest, and they are the reason this ranking counts only what we could actually verify.

What we would tell you to do instead

A credential count is a starting filter, not a decision. Before you sign with anyone on this list or off it:

Verify their licence yourself at the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry — it takes a minute and it is the single most checkable fact about any Minnesota contractor.
Ask what their warranty actually says, in writing. Most builders we researched publish nothing about warranty at all.
Walk a finished home and talk to the family living in it.

You can browse every builder we researched, with their sourced credentials attached, in our Twin Cities builder directory.