How Perch grades a billboard
A real walkthrough — not a hypothetical. Every number below is live, pulled from the same dataset that powers the map.
Say you're scouting billboard space along Chicago's expressway network. Permit #016-502052 sits on Kennedy Expwy near West Town — one of 1196 permitted billboards Perch tracks citywide. Here's what the data says about it.
1. Start with real traffic
IDOT's Annual Average Daily Traffic count for this stretch of road is 244,100 vehicles/day (2025). That alone puts it in the 97th percentile of every billboard in the city — among the very highest-traffic locations Perch has.
2. Check visibility, not just volume
High traffic on a road you can barely see the board from isn't worth much. This one scores 85/100 on visibility — highway frontage, close to the road it's scored against — so the traffic count is actually the traffic that sees the board.
3. Know the audience
The Census tract this board sits in has a median household income of $173,082 — the 96th percentile citywide. Combined with traffic, that's a 79/100 demo-fit score: a lot of people pass by, and they're an affluent audience.
4. Roll it into a grade
Traffic, visibility, and demo fit blend into a composite score of 90/100 — a Grade A+, better than 99% of the 1196 boards in the dataset. Perch's take: "Premium site — high traffic and strong visibility. Worth pursuing."
5. Check the competition
There are 6 other billboards within a quarter mile — worth knowing before you commit, since a saturated corridor splits attention across boards.
6. Put a number on it
Modeled at a $7 CPM (calibrated to real Chicago OOH rate data, see Methodology), this board comes out to roughly $17,500–$18,500/month (~$216,000/year), reaching an estimated ~3,033,000 vehicle-passes a month. A rough grade-based valuation multiple puts an implied structure value around ~$1,944,000 — a placeholder pending a real comp, not an appraisal.
None of this required a site visit, a broker call, or guesswork — just public traffic, permit, and Census data, computed the same way for every billboard in the city. That's the whole point: compare boards on the same footing before you spend time or money chasing one down.