The Firms That Move Austin

One firm appears in roughly one of every seven agent-attributed Austin entitlement hearings.

Austin Development Watch maintains a structured record of every Planning Commission and Zoning & Platting Commission case in the public record — thousands of hearings since 2016, each tagged to the agent of record. That record answers a question the market has never had a clean answer to: which firms actually carry Austin’s entitlement docket?

The ten-year leaderboard

*Method: agent-attributed hearing rows at Austin PC + ZAP, 2016–2026, from ADW’s structured case database (~9,242 hearings; ~7,789 carry an attributed agent), with duplicate agent records resolved to one person. “Approved” and “Postponed” are shares of decided outcomes (recommended/approved vs. postponed/indefinitely postponed), excluding still-pending items; with denials they total 100%. A “hearing” is one appearance of a case before a commission; a single project can generate several. Hearings that have been HEARD only — a scheduled item on a future agenda is forward docket, not record. Firm totals are reconciled to the case level and recomputed weekly — every figure traces to a record. Certified through 2026-08-25.

Coverage note. Hearing counts on this page are FLOORS, and percentages are ESTIMATES computed over the hearings we hold. Measured against the City's own meeting record, the certified store carries 6,712 of the 6,728 hearing items its source documents describe since 2016 — 99.8% — with coverage weakest in 2020 (98.7%). A firm's true hearing count is therefore at least the number shown, and a rate is the rate within the held sample rather than the full population. Coverage is measured, not assumed, and this note is derived from that measurement on every rebuild. A second step sits between these rates and the population: of the 6,667 hearing items read from the minutes, 5,513 (82.7%) state a disposition this record can classify and 1,154 do not. Unclassified items carry no outcome and are absent from every rate above, so a rate is computed over the classified part of a sample, not over the sample and not over the population. THIS LIMITS COMPARABILITY BETWEEN FIRMS. The unclassified items are not spread evenly: engineering and surveying practices carry about 75% of the named ones (Southwest Engineers, LJA Engineering, Perales Engineering, Stantec Consulting Services among them), because subdivision dispositions are recorded in grouped consent motions rather than per item. Those firms' rates therefore rest on a smaller classified subset than a zoning practice's, and a high approval share at the top of the table may reflect which of a firm's matters could be classified rather than how its matters went. WE MEASURE OUR OWN ERROR AND IT IS NOT UNIFORM. Re-reading every minutes block against the stored disposition found 8.2% disagreement across 3,073 independently-written rows before correction — 6.03% in 2017-2019, 11.73% across the remote-meeting years 2020-2022, 6.12% in 2024-2025 — and about 1.56x as high on Zoning and Platting as on Planning Commission. All of it has been corrected against the minutes and logged; the shape is published because where a record is weakest is a fact about the record.

Every firm on this table has a full page: the decade, decoded — the complete hearing arc, outcomes, and district concentration, reconciled to the certified record. See an example →

What the leaderboard says

The market is concentrated at the top and long-tailed below. The four busiest firms — Drenner Group, Armbrust & Brown, Thrower Design and Alice Glasco Consulting — together carry nearly two of every five agent-attributed hearings (39%); everyone below operates as a boutique. Drenner sits clearly at #1, and within it just two attorneys — Amanda Swor and Leah Bojo — account for roughly 91% of the firm’s pipeline.

The sharper signal is in the outcome columns. Among the volume leaders the dominant result is neither approval nor denial — it is postponement: Drenner 59%, Armbrust 65%, Thrower 62%, with the zoning boutiques higher still. The exceptions are the engineering and site-plan firms — LJA (65% approved, 22% postponed), BGE (74% / 9%) — which clear fast with little continuance. The dividing line is the work: discretionary zoning moves slowly and gets continued; by-right engineering clears. For anyone selecting counsel, benchmarking a competitor, or underwriting how long a case will take, the firm on the filing is signal — and now it is measurable.