BuildSignal is organized around area, not address — everything starts with picking the boundary you want to track.
The quickest starting point is picking a named neighborhood (like Fishtown or Kensington) or a city ward — common boundaries that make it easy to compare investment across recognizable areas of Philadelphia.
If a named neighborhood or ward doesn't match what you're actually trying to track — a specific corridor, a development zone, a radius around a project — you can define a custom boundary instead.
Once your area is picked, BuildSignal shows construction and renovation permit counts and filed permit valuations for that boundary — see Reading Permit Activity and Investment Trends for how to interpret those numbers.
Yes — areas can be defined by neighborhood, ward, or a custom boundary.
Yes — see Comparing Two Areas for how area comparison works.
Custom boundaries are flexible, but very small areas (a single block, for example) may not have enough permit activity to show a meaningful trend — a neighborhood-sized area or larger tends to produce more useful comparisons.