About Ashwrks
Three friends, one broken relay
A general contractor, a software engineer, and a land analyst kept watching the same failure from three different seats: buy land, then hire an architect, then bid a builder — each handoff shedding information and adding markup.
01 — The founding story
The relay always breaks at the handoffs
Mara built the houses and watched clients arrive with land an agent swore was buildable and drawings an architect swore were affordable — and neither was true, because neither of those professionals had ever priced site work in clay. Coral underwrote land for developers and knew the forty questions that decide buildability, but nobody asked her until after closing. Dev priced complex systems in software all day and could not understand why a house — a bill of materials and a schedule — was quoted like a mystery.
The fix wasn’t a marketplace or a lead-gen site. It was collapsing the relay: put the land questions, the design constraints, and the build pricing inside one company and one contract, and show the numbers as they actually are — ranges that narrow as facts come in, locking only when the facts are in writing.
Ashwrks opened in Columbus in our founders’ backyard, added Cincinnati when the bench was ready, and holds Cleveland at waitlist until its trades are vetted. That order — trust first, expansion second — is the company in one sentence.
02 — Principles
Four rules we don’t bend
01
One contract
Land, design, site work, build — one signature, one accountable party. When something goes wrong there is no one to point at but us, which is exactly how we want it.
02
Honest ranges
Every price is a range with a confidence label until it locks at contract. A single confident number before a feasibility study is a lie with good typography — we don’t publish those.
03
Metro by metro
We hold one state license — Ohio — but a license doesn’t build houses; a subcontractor bench and a permit desk you know by name do, and those are metro assets. We open a metro when ours are real, and we say “waitlist” until then.
04
Code is code
Zoning, covenants, and building code live in our software as constraints, not as fine print. The configurator will not let you design a home you can’t legally build on your lot — the rule and its reason are shown on screen.
03 — The team
The three seats, at one table
Portraits are line drawings on purpose — this site photographs nothing, including us.
Mara Ellison
Co-founder · General Contractor
Twenty years of custom builds across central Ohio. Holds the license, runs the trades, and wrote the punch-list holdback rule after one too many builders’ walkthroughs on the other side of the table.
Dev Ramanathan
Co-founder · Software Engineer
Built pricing systems before building houses with them. Turned Mara’s estimating spreadsheets into the live configurator, and the county codebooks into constraints the software actually enforces.
Coral Whitfield
Co-founder · Land Analyst
A decade underwriting land for developers. Wrote the 40-point feasibility checklist and built the pipeline that pulls our inventory straight from public county land records — exact property lines, real flood and soil data, no owner information.
04 — Licensing
Licensed where we build. Nowhere we don’t.
Ashwrks Building Co. is a licensed general contractor in Ohio, building in the Columbus and Cincinnati metros. Cleveland launch waitlist open.
All pricing shown online is an estimate with a stated confidence range, not a binding quote. Your price locks at contract after a site-specific feasibility review.
See how a build actually runs05 — How we source land
Real parcels, straight from public records
Every lot in our inventory is a real parcel of record. The boundary you see on the map is the exact property line from the county auditor — not a dropped pin — enriched with public flood, soil, and elevation data from FEMA NFHL, USDA NRCS SSURGO, USGS 3DEP. We pull it from public county GIS and strip every owner and mailing field before it reaches the app.
Because these come from land records rather than a listings site, a parcel here is a candidate homesite, not an active listing. Availability is “confirm on inquiry” — we check with the owner before you commit — and the money we show is an estimated land value, not an asking price. You can also bring your own parcel; we run the same feasibility on it.
Sources today: Franklin County Auditor, Delaware County Auditor, Hamilton County / CAGIS, Cuyahoga County Fiscal Office.
Read “Is this land actually for sale?”30
Parcels of record
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Ohio metros
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County sources
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Public datasets