Watchers

What a watcher is

A watcher is four things: where (one or more regions), what (which signals), an optional value range, and a name. Every day we run that question against the day that just closed and email you what it caught.

It is a stored question, not a stored list of results. That matters when you change one: see changing a watcher.

Building one

From Watchers, press New watcher.

Point at your territory. Click regions on the map. Most people cannot name the county they work in but recognise its shape, which is why the map leads. The dropdown beside it does the same job for the keyboard, and works when the map cannot load.
Pick your signals. The menu shows what the regions you picked can actually produce, grouped the way the filters group them. Leave everything unchecked to follow all activity.
Set a value range, if it helps. A minimum, a maximum, or both.
Name it. A name is suggested from your picks and you can overwrite it. Below the form, a plain sentence says what the watcher will do, so you can check it against what you meant.

Regions per watcher are capped. The counter above the map says how many you have used and the map stops adding once you reach it. If you need to cover more ground than one watcher allows, build a second one.

Two things about that menu are worth knowing.

It is the union across your regions, not the intersection. A watcher can span regions with different coverage, and hiding everything they do not all support would silently drop the reason you added the second region. A signal one region carries and another does not still fires; it just fires less often.

Signals marked limited are wired up and have not fired in your regions yet. They are not broken and not hypothetical. Anything a region's feeds structurally cannot produce is never offered at all, so what is left is the honest remaining distinction: proven here, against wired and waiting. Including one is fine. Building a watcher entirely out of them is how you end up with a fortnight of silence.

The full list of what each signal means is on Signals.

The value range

Value is the dollar figure the record itself carries: a permit's declared job value, a sale price, an assessed amount. Setting a minimum is the fastest way to cut a permit firehose down to the jobs worth a phone call.

Records that carry no value at all do not pass a range filter. Most code violations, occupancy certificates and condition changes carry none, so a watcher with a minimum set will mostly return permits and sales. That is usually what somebody setting one wants, and it is worth knowing before you conclude a signal has gone quiet.

Reading a watcher

Opening a watcher shows the same instrument the map uses, scoped to what this watcher catches.

A 30-day histogram, stacked and coloured by signal. Clicking a bar jumps to that day.
A day stepper. Back goes as far as the watcher's history runs; forward stops at today, because there is no day after today.
Signal chips with counts, which filter the day instantly without refetching. Every chip that occurs starts on, and the last one on cannot be switched off, so you are never left staring at an empty screen with no way back.
A map of the day's matches and a feed of them, address first. Clicking either opens that record.

The day, the region and the chips are all in the URL, so a filtered day is a link you can send to a colleague.

The watchers page

The landing page answers three questions in order: is anything happening in my territory, which watcher should I open, and is each one still working.

The chart at the top is the pulse: everything happening across the regions you watch, unfiltered. It is deliberately not the sum of your watchers. Each card below charts only what its own filters catch, and the distance between the two is the useful part. A tall pulse over flat cards means your filters are tight, or that a second watcher is worth having.

Each card shows this week's count, a fourteen-day sparkline, the watcher's configuration in one line, and, on a quiet one, when it last caught anything. The window is fourteen days rather than seven because activity is sharply weekday-shaped: a trailing week is five tall bars and two flat ones, and only the position of the flat pair ever changes. Two weeks shows the rhythm and lets you compare this week with last.

A card reading Nothing in 14 days still draws its sparkline. Fourteen empty days say "we looked and there was nothing", which blank space does not.

Changing a watcher

Edit is on the card's overflow menu and on the watcher's own page. It is the same screen as the builder.

Filters apply to the whole history, not just from now on. A watcher is a stored question re-run per day, so narrowing it makes last week look quieter too, and widening it can surface things you had not seen. This is intended, and the builder says so while you are editing.

How many you can have

The watcher cap is per person, not pooled across the organization. Everybody on a team plan gets their own allowance, which is what makes a shared account workable: an estimator and a business developer watch different things over the same ground without competing for slots.

The counter above the list shows how many you have used. At the cap, the primary button becomes the way past it rather than a button that would fail. Current numbers are on billing.

Deleting one

Delete is on the card's overflow menu. It asks first, and it cannot be undone. Deleting a watcher does not touch any property you have activated; those belong to the organization and stay.

When watchers stop

Watchers need an active plan. If a subscription lapses or is cancelled, the watchers stay exactly as configured, the digest stops, and the whole surface asks you to subscribe. Resubscribing brings them back unchanged.