RevitCity: A Practical Guide for BIM Professionals

If you've worked in Revit for more than a few months, you've probably landed on RevitCity while searching for a furniture family, a stair detail, or an answer to a modeling problem at 11 PM before a deadline. RevitCity is one of the oldest community-driven resources built around Autodesk Revit, and it still shows up in search results for a reason: it's a large, user-contributed library of families, forum threads, and tutorials that predates a lot of the polished commercial content platforms we use today.

This guide breaks down what RevitCity actually is, how to use it well, where it falls short, and how it fits into a broader BIM content strategy. Note upfront: this is not an Autodesk-affiliated resource, and details like site features, upload policies, or account requirements can change — always check the current site directly rather than relying on older blog posts (including this one) for exact specifics.

What RevitCity Actually Is

RevitCity is a community website built around three core pillars:

A family library — user-submitted RFA files covering furniture, fixtures, equipment, structural components, site elements, and more.
A discussion forum — long-running threads on modeling techniques, troubleshooting, workflow questions, and general Revit gripes.
Tutorials and articles — mostly community-written, ranging from basic family creation to more advanced parametric modeling tricks.

It's not a manufacturer-hosted BIM content platform. That distinction matters. Manufacturer libraries (think plumbing fixture companies or HVAC equipment makers) publish families tied to real, purchasable products with accurate specs. RevitCity content is largely generic or symbolic — good for space planning, massing, and early design, but not something you'd want to schedule for procurement without verification.

Why CAD/BIM Teams Still Use It

Despite newer competitors, RevitCity persists in a lot of firms' bookmarks for a few practical reasons:

Volume and age — Years of uploads mean there's often something close to what you need, even for oddball items.
Forum history — Old threads frequently answer questions that newer forums (Autodesk's own community, Reddit, LinkedIn groups) haven't covered as thoroughly, simply because they've been indexed by search engines for over a decade.
No-frills access — For firms that don't have a subscription to a paid content library, it's a familiar, low-friction option.

That said, treat it as a supplement to your BIM content workflow, not a replacement for vetted manufacturer content or your firm's internal standards library.

How to Search RevitCity Effectively

Generic keyword searches on any community content site tend to return noisy results. A few practical tips:

Search by category first, then keyword. If the site organizes families by division or object type, narrow there before typing a free-text search — it cuts down on irrelevant hits.
Check the upload date. Older families were often built in earlier Revit versions and may carry outdated parameters, nested family structures, or geometry that doesn't align with current modeling standards. Open them and inspect before trusting them in a live project.
Read the forum thread attached to a download, if there is one. Sometimes users flag issues (broken parameters, oversized file sizes, wrong units) in the comments.
Use your browser's site search as a backup. A query like site:revitcity.com [keyword] in a search engine sometimes surfaces content faster than the internal search tool, depending on how the site's search is indexed.

Quality Control: The Part Everyone Skips

This is the most important section of this guide, and it's the one most people ignore when they're in a hurry.

Community-uploaded Revit families are a mixed bag. Before you drop a downloaded family into a production model, run through this checklist:

File Health Checks

Open it in a blank project first. Never load an unknown family directly into a live project file. If it's corrupted or bloated, you don't want that baggage in your working model.
Check file size. A simple furniture family that's 15 MB is a red flag — it likely has excessive geometry, unnecessary nested families, or unpurged content.
Purge and audit. Use Revit's Purge Unused and Audit tools on any imported family before committing to it.
Inspect nested families. Deeply nested, poorly organized families slow down your model and complicate scheduling.

Parameter and Standards Checks

Verify parameter names match your firm's standards. A door family with a parameter called "Width_1" instead of your firm's standard "Width" parameter will break your schedules and tags.
Check for shared parameters vs. family parameters. If you need consistency across tagging and scheduling, shared parameters matter — many community families don't use them correctly.
Confirm units and category assignment. It sounds basic, but a furniture item accidentally categorized as "Generic Model" instead of "Furniture" will not behave the way you expect in schedules, filters, or visibility settings.

Geometry Checks

Level of detail vs. project phase. A hyper-detailed chair with hundreds of faces is fine for a rendering but murder on model performance if you have 200 of them scattered through a floor plan used for construction documents.
Symbolic lines for plan views. Good families switch to simplified symbolic representation in coarse detail levels. Many community families skip this, which bloats file size and slows down view regeneration.

RevitCity vs. Other Content Sources

| Source | Best For | Watch Out For | |---|---|---| | RevitCity | Generic families, older forum knowledge, quick placeholders | Inconsistent quality, outdated files, unverified specs | | Manufacturer BIM libraries | Procurement-accurate equipment and fixtures | Larger file sizes, sometimes locked-down customization | | Autodesk's own content libraries | Native compatibility, generally cleaner base geometry | Narrower selection compared to community sites | | Firm-internal standards library | Guaranteed compliance with your BIM execution plan | Requires upfront investment to build and maintain | | Paid third-party content platforms | Curated, consistently structured families | Subscription cost; verify current terms and offerings directly with the vendor |

None of these fully replaces the others. A mature BIM workflow typically pulls from all of them depending on project phase: generic community content for early design, manufacturer content once systems are selected, and firm-standard content for anything used repeatedly across projects.

Using the Forums Without Wasting Time

The forum side of RevitCity is genuinely useful for troubleshooting, but old threads carry a risk: Revit's UI, tools, and even terminology change across versions. A workflow described in a 2011 thread about adaptive components or in-place families may not map cleanly onto a current release.

Practical approach:

Cross-reference the thread date against your Revit version. If a thread predates your version by five or more releases, verify the steps still apply before following them line by line.
Check official documentation for anything version-specific. Ribbon locations, tool names, and default behaviors shift between releases — confirm in current Autodesk documentation or Help resources rather than assuming a forum post from years ago is still accurate.
Use forums for concepts, not exact click-paths. The underlying logic behind a workaround (say, using a nested formula to control visibility) often still applies even if the exact menu location has moved.

Building Content Habits That Scale

If your team relies heavily on downloaded families from any community source, a few habits save headaches down the line:

Create a firm-side quarantine folder. Downloaded families go there first, get reviewed and cleaned, then move into your approved content library.
Rename and standardize on import. Don't let a family named "chair_FINAL_v3_reallyfinal.rfa" go straight into a project.
Document where content came from. If a family later causes a scheduling or clash issue, knowing its source saves troubleshooting time.
Re-test after major Revit version upgrades. Families that worked fine in one release sometimes behave unexpectedly after an upgrade, particularly if they use formulas or nested conditional logic.

Final Take

RevitCity earns its long tenure in BIM bookmarks by being broad, old, and free to browse. It's a reasonable first stop for generic content and a decent archive of community troubleshooting knowledge. It is not a substitute for manufacturer-verified content when accuracy matters, nor a replacement for your firm's own quality-controlled family library.

Treat anything you pull from it the way you'd treat any third-party download: inspect it, clean it, standardize it, and only then let it into a production model. And because website features, licensing terms for use of uploaded content, and site structure can change over time, confirm current details directly on the site rather than relying on older guides.