Chris Lyons grew up picking up trash on job sites. Not metaphorically. Literally walking behind his dad’s crew in Amarillo, Texas, cleaning up scraps and debris from the time he was about ten years old. He hated it so much that he eventually talked himself into a job with the insulator instead. Then he found himself in a 150-degree attic blowing cellulose and reconsidered everything.
That’s the kind of origin story that actually means something. Because when Chris eventually launched Home by Lyons in 2016, he wasn’t guessing at how job sites work. He’d lived it from the ground up, and that shaped everything about how he built his company.
In this conversation, Chris and Michael Krisa get into the real stuff. Not the highlight reel. The part where Chris quit his steady warehouse job in 2007, with a newborn at home and his wife’s income coming from a salon she owned, walked into the office past a “Congrats, Chris” banner on his first day back from paternity leave, and handed in his notice. Then 2008 happened.
He made it through, built the real estate side, and by 2016 was ready to start building homes. But rather than fold into his dad’s existing company, he started his own. The reason says a lot about how he thinks: his dad built an incredible business on referrals, paper ledgers, and late nights at the office. Chris wanted to build something with technology at its core from day one.
The centerpiece of that is full budget transparency. Every client gets access to a live view of every dollar being spent on their build, from the first draw to the last. That decision came directly from watching how some builders handled budget surprises on the real estate side, and he’s direct about what he saw.
“What would happen, we’d be building and we’d be going and we’d think everything was fine, and then we’d get to the end and the builder would say, ‘Hey client, you’re 30 grand over.’ And the client had no idea. That was the first time they heard about it, right before closing. It caused a lot of friction between the builder and the client. I saw that and I didn’t like it.”
So he went the other direction entirely. Clients log into BuilderTrend and can see every penny, at any point, in real time. It means having the uncomfortable conversation more than once during a build. But it also means no blowups at closing.
“This open book model, it’s fantastic, but it holds the builder accountable, really, every step throughout the whole build. We’re having some of those uneasy conversations more often than just at the end, but it makes it where at the end they know what’s coming and they know what to expect.”
BuilderTrend is also the backbone for scheduling, cost tracking, and field communication across everything Home by Lyons does. Every plan lives on Google Drive. The crew has iPads with cell service so they’re never driving to the office to pull up a drawing. It’s a long way from his dad’s pickup truck, where 20 sets of plans lived on the dashboard.
The transparency model is just one piece of how he thinks about running a company. The bigger thread through this whole conversation is systems. What they allow you to do when things get hard, and what happens when you don’t have them. During COVID, Home by Lyons was running 55 custom homes at a time with a team of about five people. The money was good. But it stretched everything to its limit and made Chris rethink the model going forward. They’ve since shifted toward a hybrid approach, with 16 pre-designed plans available alongside full custom, which gives clients a real starting point without turning the whole operation into a production line.
He’s honest about where things went sideways too. A few years back, when the market shifted and inventory stopped moving, Home by Lyons got caught holding 13 homes. They lost money on every one of them.
“There was one week that I closed on two homes and we lost 250 grand that week. You’re sitting there, up at night. I’m saying this for other builders: it’s not always easy. We’re going to win some, we’re going to lose some. You just got to make sure you’re strong enough to make it through the hard times.”
They made it through. But he doesn’t pretend it was anything other than what it was. The lesson wasn’t to stop building spec homes. It was to always ask: if we have to carry this for two years, can we?
On the people side, Chris is blunt about a trap he sees a lot of builders fall into, trying to do everything themselves for too long.
“One life lesson I learned is trying to do it all myself. It costs me more money, me trying to do everything, than actually hiring people that know what they’re doing.”
He watched his dad work until 11 at night because it was just him, handling sales, accounting, everything, all on paper. Chris built his company differently. And he’s equally direct about the flip side of that coin: builders who wait too long to pull the trigger on growth, endlessly planning and never executing.
“Instead of ready, aim, fire, mine’s ready, fire, and then I just aim. I’ve seen people get caught in the ready, aim, and they never fire. You’re not going to make it perfect. Things change so much that you just got to jump out there and figure it out.”
The back half of the conversation shifts to Chris’s role as president of the Texas Association of Builders. He’s been involved since his realtor days, eventually working up through the ranks to run in the first contested state election in 13 years. He talks about what the association actually does, the lobbying work, impact fee legislation, and helping secure $850 million in state funding for Texas State Technical College to train the next generation of construction workers. That last one matters a lot right now. Labor is tight and it’s not getting easier without a real pipeline coming through.
On the impact fee fight, he makes the math plain:
“Every thousand dollars a house goes up, it takes out a lot of buyers. We’re fighting this big problem right now on affordability across the U.S. to keep prices low so people can afford it. But if you start adding these impact fees and all this regulation, all that does is make the home a little bit higher and a little bit higher.”
And on why any of this matters to a builder who’d rather stay out of politics:
“Without having people at state level and national level, housing would be a lot more money than it is today.”
If you’re a builder who’s been on the fence about getting more involved, Chris makes the case clearly. Government is paying attention to housing. The question is whether you’re in the room when the decisions get made.
Home by Lyons builds in Amarillo and Lubbock, Texas, in the $700K to $1.5M range, anywhere from 20 to 55 homes at a time.
About Chris Lyons
Chris Lyons grew up watching his parents build and sell custom homes. His father Paul is a respected home builder, and his mother Mary Lou a seasoned real estate professional, and the two have been doing it together since 1983. Raised in Canyon, just south of Amarillo, Chris earned a Business Administration degree from West Texas A&M University before joining Lyons Realty, where he helped grow the firm into a 60-agent brokerage serving Amarillo, Canyon, and Lubbock.
In 2016 he founded Home by Lyons, carrying forward the family’s approach to residential construction while building the kind of technology-driven, transparency-first operation his parents’ generation didn’t have the tools to run. In 2024 he co-founded LYITE Development, a commercial construction and development company operating with the same client-first philosophy. In November 2025, Chris was installed as President of the Texas Association of Builders, a role that reflects how seriously he takes the industry’s ability to fight for itself at the legislative level.
He builds in the Texas Panhandle and South Plains, and he does it the way he was taught: do the right thing, take care of the client, and the money will follow.
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