About the data

1. 1. On a Board agenda. The disposition appears on a published Board agenda or in the meeting package.
2. 2. Board approval. The Board's minutes record an approving vote on it.
3. 3. Council approval of the disposition. City Council adopts a resolution approving the sale. This is a separate step from the earlier resolutions that moved the properties into the Land Bank.
4. 4. Deed into the Land Bank. A recorded transfer put the properties in the Land Bank's hands.
5. 5. Closing. The Land Bank's settlement records show the sale to the buyer.

• The Board's minutes and its counsel say a disposition of property valued at $50,000 or more needs six approving votes, however many members are present. Value appears to mean appraised value. We have not confirmed the rule for dispositions below $50,000.
• A vote with fewer than six approvals is no decision: the proposal is neither approved nor denied. Absences and early departures can therefore decide whether a vote reaches six. We count them and never guess how an absent member would have voted.
• Votes are shown by member only where the minutes or a transcript name them. A unanimous voice vote names nobody, so it appears as "unanimous" and nothing more.
• After Board approval, most dispositions go to City Council for a resolution. A project can be approved by the Board and still wait on, or be withdrawn before, Council.

Disposition

The sale or transfer of a Land Bank property.

Interagency transfer

A project that moves a property from one public agency to another instead of selling it to a private buyer.

Turn the Key

A Land Bank homeownership program that sells newly built homes at a capped price to first-time buyers earning below the area median income. Program site. A closing counts as Turn the Key when its settlement record prices single-family homes at the program's capped price (about $280,000), or when PHDC's Turn the Key brochures list its lots. Market-rate homes on the same closing are not counted.

Median

The middle value: half of the cases took less, half took more.

Quorum

The number of members who must be present for the Board to vote.

OPA account number

The City Office of Property Assessment's identifier for a property.

• Each number of days is measured from one property's own dates, so a project with 80 properties counts as 80. The Overview tile "Median days from Board approval to closing" counts closings within projects instead, so it differs from the table.
• A step is measured only when both dates are on record and in order. Where a closing predates the Board approval, or the dates otherwise run backwards, the property is left out of that step and the Overview says how many.
• Only properties that reached the later step are measured. A property approved and still waiting is not in the approval-to-closing figures, so the most recent years can look faster than they will turn out to be.
• For the Council step we use the first resolution naming the property that Council adopted on or after the Board approval. The records do not say which resolution approves the sale, so treat this step as an estimate.
• We do not measure the days to the date a property was deeded into the Land Bank. That deed often comes after the Board approval, because it is a transfer from the Redevelopment Authority or the City, not a wait.

• The Board's agendas, meeting packages, approved minutes and, from late 2022, certified transcripts: obtained through a Right-to-Know request to the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation (PHDC), which staffs the Land Bank, and from the Land Bank's website.
• The Land Bank's dispositions workbook (closings back to 2017, with Board and Council resolution numbers and dates), supplied by PHDC.
• City Council resolutions and sponsors from Council's Legistar records, and the City Office of Property Assessment (OPA) records, used to match addresses to parcels.

• The 22 Board meetings from 2016 to 2019 are not in our records, so many older sales show no agenda or Board vote even though they closed.
• Two 2025 meeting packages (February 11 and July 8) are missing, and a few minutes and transcript pages are incomplete.
• About 30 transcripts are scanned images read by software, so a quoted passage may contain reading errors. Each quote links to its page once the documents are hosted.
• Project grouping joins records by address and buyer. A project marked "Records may be mixed" has a grouping we could not fully confirm.

Board members, Councilmembers, Land Bank and City staff, applicants and people who spoke for an organization (a registered community organization, civic association, nonprofit, garden, business or developer) are named as the Board's public records name them. Residents who spoke or wrote for themselves are counted, with the positions they stated, but not named, and their names are withheld in quoted passages. A stated position is counted only where the person said it at a hearing or in a letter; letters read aloud are staff summaries. Nothing here says why anyone took a position.

• The Overview page links two spreadsheets, one row per project and one row per property. They hold what the pages show and nothing more: no current-owner classification, no permit records and no information about individual people.
• Dates are year-month-day. Several values in one cell are separated by semicolons because organization names contain commas. A blank cell means the records show nothing for it, not that the answer is zero.
• The Build Philly Now Turn the Key columns mark properties on our own proposed list. They are our analysis, not a Land Bank or City record.

If a record is wrong, missing or misread, write to Jon Geeting, Policy and Advocacy Director, Build Philly Now, at jon@buildphillynow.org. Include the page and what the record shows; corrections are made in the source data and the site is regenerated.