Somerville, Massachusetts
Our sixth market. Every figure on this page comes from the current City of Somerville qualification cycle, run on issued records from the city’s Applications for Permits and Licenses register. The newest construction permits in this cycle were issued three days before the run; the dataset itself was updated the day of the run. Coverage on this page is the City of Somerville only: a compact city of about 4 square miles and seven wards, directly across the Charles River from Boston and Cambridge. Other markets open only after their data passes the same checks; the markets section on the home page shows what is live and what is in preparation.
Latest 30-day run of the qualification engine on City of Somerville records.
How to read Somerville honestly, because this market’s shape is specific: this is a trade-work feed with a building tail, not the reverse. Service job kinds are 156 of 282 projects under the run classification, and Building Permits and Electrical Permits dominate the construction rows. Median stated project value is $15,851.50 (the statistical median of the 240 projects that carry a stated value), and the stated total is driven by a small number of large projects.
The value shape: by stated value, 156 projects under $25,000, 71 between $25,000 and $150,000, 13 over $150,000, and 42 with no stated value. 85.1 percent of projects (240) carry a stated valuation, totaling $12,076,134 counted once per project.
The source permit classes split this cycle’s projects as 242 residential and 40 commercial, with 0 unclassified. That split derives from the application subtype prefix in this window; it is a window observation, not a schema guarantee.
How Somerville projects are classified
Every project carries one class, and the class says only what the record supports. No class claims that any scope of work is unfilled.
Class A Contractor named on a building permit
A contractor is named in the record on one of the project’s building permits. The source carries a single untyped contractor name per record and never types that contractor as a general contractor, so PermitScope does not call these parties general contractors, here or anywhere. 144 projects this cycle.
Class B Trade-led
No contractor is named on a building permit, but a party is named on the project, most often the contractor on a trade permit, or the applicant. 138 projects this cycle. Coverage here is bimodal by design: Plumbing Permit and Gas Fitting rows carry no contractor or cost in the source, so those projects run applicant-led.
Class C Watchlist
No party is named anywhere in the record. In Somerville this cycle that is exactly 0 projects, a structural result: the applicant field fills 98.4 percent of Active rows, so almost every project names at least an applicant.
Mapped from real Somerville permit scope, hand-audited
These are the trades PermitScope has hand-audited in Somerville. Each was sampled project by project against the actual permit scope text, the matching rules were corrected locally for Somerville permit language, and the corrected counts were re-verified on fresh samples before any figure was published. Implied trades are PermitScope inference from scope text and permit types, and they are labeled as inference on every project card in every report.
Matched this cycle under the corrected, audited rules: Electrical 129 projects (45.7 percent), Plumbing Fixtures 32 (11.3 percent), Roofing 29 (10.3 percent), Tile 19 (6.7 percent), Excavation 9 (3.2 percent), Stucco & Siding 8 (2.8 percent). 205 projects (72.7 percent) carry at least one implied trade. The Electrical figure is permit-type-inclusive: an Electrical Permit in a project’s group credits the project, because the shared engine’s scope text carries no permit type. It is not an implied-only count and is not comparable to another city’s implied-only Electrical figure.
Coverage differs sharply by trade and is never averaged on this page: Building Permit, Electrical Permit, Sheet Metal, and Demolition rows carry a contractor and a cost on effectively every row, while Plumbing Permit and Gas Fitting rows carry neither on any row in the source. The firms on those two trades appear only as applicants, so plumbing and gas projects run applicant-led by design. Other trade labels appear in the data but have not been hand-audited in this market, so PermitScope does not market them by name here until they are audited.
Territory in Somerville works two ways, your choice. By ward: all seven wards, with Ward 5 carrying the most projects this cycle at 48 of the 281 territory-matched projects and Ward 3 at 44. Or by radius around your base address: because Somerville is compact, a 3 mile radius from a central base covers effectively the whole city (a 1 mile radius around 54 Belmont St covers 171 projects), so ward is the finer filter and the primary method for this market. One project this cycle, 250 Water St, carries no coordinates or ward in the source; it cannot be ward or radius matched and stays in the citywide feed, and we say so rather than guess where it belongs. ZIP is not offered as a territory method here: it is only embedded in the address text, and 45 of 282 projects carry no ZIP at all.
Largest projects by stated value in the record
Values are the filer’s reported construction value, printed only when the record states at least $500. The party named is the party named in the record, where one is named.
| Project | Stated value | Party named in record | Recorded scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| 54 Belmont St | $1,373,500 | Express Remodeling Group (contractor, on a building permit) | Full renovation, addition and ADU conversion, with a foundation-only companion permit and a complete electrical renovation (4 permits, lead permit issued 2026-10-07) |
| 20 Prospect St | $1,336,000 | R. W. Hyde Construction, Inc. (contractor) | Office fit out: concrete slab, carpentry, drywall, doors, paint, flooring, glass and aluminum frames, millwork, ceilings (2 permits, lead permit issued 2026-10-22) |
| 32 Pinckney St | $823,000 | Velney Construction LLC (contractor) | New construction of a 3-unit ground-up build (1 permit, issued 2026-09-28) |
| 9 Taylor St | $598,000 | No project lead named; a contractor is named on the trade permit itself | 34 new units (1 permit, an Electrical Permit, issued 2026-09-28; trade-led) |
| 38 Magnus Ave | $559,000 | Express Remodeling Group (contractor) | Washer connection and kitchen re-plumbing among the group’s scopes (4 permits, lead permit issued 2026-10-06) |
| 26 Summer St | $330,000 | JLP Construction Services Inc (contractor) | Interior gut rehab of a single-family home, added 3/4 bath, insulation, drywall and plaster, cabinets, fixtures (2 permits, lead permit issued 2026-10-08) |
| 1 Fitchburg St | $320,442 | Stella Construction (contractor) | Wiring for a bath renovation, added bedroom circuits, panel upgrade, among the group’s scopes (3 permits, lead permit issued 2026-10-07) |
All permits behind this table and the sample report’s three project cards (18 permits in total) were re-verified live, each returning exactly 1 record with matching address, Issued status, contractor, cost, and issue date. Value alone never makes a named-party lead; the class follows the named parties and the permit the name sits on, not the dollar figure.
Real reports, built from this cycle’s records
The Somerville sample below was generated from live records by the same engine that builds subscriber digests, and its featured projects were re-verified permit by permit against the city’s live data.
Somerville Construction Intelligence, sample report
The cycle at a glance, the largest projects, activity by audited trade, measured data quality, and three verified project cards.
Read the sample reportMethod and honesty notes
• Valuations are filer-reported construction costs, not verified budgets. 7 projects rest on placeholder values only and are flagged, never printed as dollar figures; 34 projects carry conflicting valuations across their permits, shown as conflicts rather than summed. The median on this page is the statistical median of the 240 stated values, $15,851.50; the pipeline’s upper-middle value is $15,900, and the sample report records that correction with a dated note (2026-10-25).
• No party in this market is called a general contractor of record. The contractor column is untyped per record: the dataset catalog describes it in general terms, but trade permits carry that trade’s own firms in the same column, so the catalog wording is not per-record typing. Class A copy says only that a contractor is named on a building permit in the city record.
• A permit says work was authorized. It never says a scope is open, a bid is being taken, or a contractor is hiring. No project on this page claims availability of work.
• Completeness in the source this cycle: contractor on 81.7 percent of Active rows, with the bimodal split by permit type described above; applicant on 98.4 percent of Active rows; scope 100 percent; address 99.8 percent; ward and coordinates on 99.5 percent of Active rows.
Data: City of Somerville Open Data, Applications for Permits and Licenses dataset (dataset identifier nneb-s3f7), published under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0, with attribution to SomerStat, City of Somerville. PermitScope reads the records; the city does not endorse this service, and subscribers receive no advance or privileged access to them.
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