Any agent can say a neighborhood is "up and coming." The ones who win listings can show it — with permit trends, new development, and block-level activity pulled straight from Philadelphia's public record. That is the difference between an opinion and market intelligence you can defend.
Clients have gotten skeptical, and for good reason. They have all seen a portal "estimate" swing by fifty thousand dollars overnight with no explanation. So when an agent asserts that a block is heating up or that a seller should price aggressively, the unspoken question is: how do you know? If the answer is instinct, a sharp buyer's agent or a nervous seller will poke holes in it. If the answer is "here is the permitted investment on the surrounding blocks over the last few years, and here is where it comes from," the conversation is over. You have moved from persuasion to evidence.
ALKARTIS is built to give you that evidence for Philadelphia today. Two live tools do most of the work.
BuildSignal turns Philadelphia L&I permits and their declared construction valuations into a trend you can read at the neighborhood level. Permits are a leading indicator that comps are not: they capture money people have already committed to putting into buildings, months or years before those projects show up in closed-sale data. When you can show a seller that permitted investment around their block has been climbing — with new construction and major renovation clustering nearby — you are giving them a reason to trust your pricing that no portal can match.
Comps tell you where the market has been. Permits tell you where owners are betting it is going. Show a client both and you are no longer guessing with them — you are informing them.
For a buyer, the same data answers the question underneath every showing: is this a smart place to put money? Rising permitted investment nearby is a concrete, sourced signal that others are investing in the same few blocks.
Markets are made block by block, and buyers know it. BlockWatcher brings block-level activity — permits, violations, and other public-record signals around a specific address — into a single view. Before a listing appointment, you can walk the block's record and get ahead of anything a buyer's agent will surface. Before writing an offer, you can show a buyer what is actually happening on the surrounding parcels rather than leaving them to imagine it. It reframes the vaguest, most emotional part of a real estate decision — "what is this neighborhood really like" — as something you can answer with the record.
Everything above lives in the tools today. The piece still being built is packaging: ListingIQ's HomeBrief report is designed to turn this market narrative into one branded document you can hand to a client. HomeBrief is in development and not yet live, so for now you build the story inside BuildSignal and BlockWatcher and present from there.
ALKARTIS follows one rule across every product: every figure traces back to a checkable public record. For an agent, that rule is not a technicality — it is what lets you make a strong claim about a neighborhood and defend it to a client who has learned to distrust confident-sounding numbers. Intelligence you can explain is intelligence a client can trust, and trust is what closes.
Philadelphia. BuildSignal and BlockWatcher run on live Philadelphia public records today. As new cities come online we expand market by market, but everything on this page is about the data we can actually stand behind now: Philadelphia.
Portal estimates are opaque models that neither you nor your client can audit. ALKARTIS shows the underlying signal — permitted investment, new development, and block-level activity from the City's own records — and lets you trace every figure back to its public source. It is evidence you can explain, not a black-box number.
No. The ListingIQ HomeBrief report is in development and not yet live. Today you use BuildSignal and BlockWatcher directly to build your market narrative. When HomeBrief ships it will turn that narrative into a single branded, client-facing report.
Yes — that is the point. Because every number traces to a checkable Philadelphia public record, you can cite it to a buyer or seller and defend it. Sourced data is exactly what lets you make a claim about a neighborhood and stand behind it.
No. BuildSignal and BlockWatcher are built for working agents. You search a neighborhood or an address and read the trend and the activity directly — no spreadsheets, no analyst required.
See how BuildSignal and BlockWatcher sharpen your listing presentations and buyer advice across Philadelphia. Our team can walk you or your brokerage through it.