Main Spotlight: Insights, Reflections, and What’s Next with the BOOMS Tracker

One year ago, in April 2024, the Main Street America Research team launched the Building Opportunities on Main Street Tracker — our map-centric, mobile-friendly property inventory tool designed to gather, store, and showcase information about buildings and lots in local Main Street districts. The platform is a major component of our multi-year ​“At Home on Main Street” research initiative, which has been generously supported by the 1772 Foundation. To celebrate the BOOMS Tracker’s first birthday, we reflect on some insights from the data, challenges we’ve faced and overcome, and exciting updates ahead. 

What We’ve Learned So Far from BOOMS Inventory Data 

We are thrilled by the number of local leaders and regional coordinators who are making use of BOOMS. Nearly 450 local programs and coordinating programs have signed into the platform since it launched, and more than 100 users logged in this April. 

According to the BOOMS Tracker leaderboards, Iowa is leading the charge with BOOMS participation as a state. More than a third of all properties in Main Street Iowa districts have been tracked — nearly 4,000 in all. At the local level, our friends at Hilltop Campus Village in Davenport, Iowa, still hold the record for the number of parcels tracked (610!). We also want to shout out Point Pleasant, West Virginia; Florence, South Carolina; Melbourne, Florida; and many other superusers. Great work, everyone! 

To date, local leaders have tracked more than 15,000 parcels and uploaded more than 4,000 photos and attachments using the platform. Here are some of our key takeaways from the data so far: 

• There’s lots of room for activation, development, and growth. About 20% of all tracked buildings are partially or entirely vacant, 22% of parcels without buildings sit idle, and 10% of all tracked properties are parking lots. If the current rate of vacancy for tracked parcels holds for all properties included in BOOMS across the entire national Main Street network, we would be looking at an amount of vacant space that could accommodate about 190,000 housing units.
• If activated, vacant spaces in Main Street districts could provide an incredible boost to Main Street economies. We estimate that there is enough vacant space for between 100 – 200 additional housing units in each Main Street district. Using the methodology documented in our Housing Guidebook for Local Leaders, we estimate that filling all the vacant spaces in Main Street districts with housing units would lead to between $140,000 and $575,000 extra dollars in revenue for businesses and property owners in each Main Street every month.
• The characteristics of Main Street buildings are striking. According to data entered by local leaders, nearly 25% of all tracked properties are culturally significant, historically significant, or significant in terms of their use. Additionally, about 14% of all tracked properties need some maintenance or repair. 

Four Challenges We’ve Faced

The first year of the BOOMS Tracker has not been entirely smooth. Here are four challenges we’ve worked to overcome since the platform launched. 

1. Credentialing and Email Verification: The MSA Research team serves as the BOOMS Tracker platform administrators, assisting Main Street leaders in using their usernames and passwords to get started. This has proven challenging to balance alongside our regular workload. Our response times for login credentials lagged severely at several points over the past year, leading users to feel stymied and frustrated. Since the start of 2025, however, we have prioritized addressing these issues by delivering credentials to 900+ additional programs in an early January, and in March, we implemented a ticketing system to work through requests in a more organized and timely manner. The underlying architecture of the BOOMS platform is moving toward requiring email verification for all BOOMS Tracker users. When users initially sign in, they are prompted to verify their email addresses and enter a six-character code sent to the email address listed on file. Because the MSA Research team administers all BOOMS accounts, however, this often leads to email verification codes landing in our Research inbox without apparent use. On the user side, BOOMS users might expect to see the verification code in their email inboxes and feel confused or frustrated that they’re not receiving it. If current or new BOOMS users need support overcoming the email verification step once and for all, they can reach out to the MSA Research team via this form and request manual email verification.
2. Users with Complete Inventories Stuck at Less Than 100% Completion: Officially, 11 local programs have tracked 100% of their properties using BOOMS. But we believe many additional programs have entered data for every apparent property and are nevertheless stuck at a lower percentage on the BOOMS Leaderboard. In some cases, there are small errant slivers of properties — artifacts of strange subdivisions of land in GIS — that are easy to overlook. In other cases, there may be parcels that are stacked on top of one another, making them impossible to select and ​“track” with BOOMS. The MSA Research team worked with our GIS development partners at Blue Raster to develop a workaround, but for the moment, that workaround requires the involvement of MSA staff. If you believe you’re encountering this issue, please let us know.
3. Making BOOMS Data Readily Downloadable: Since we first dreamed of building BOOMS, our take on data accessibility has been that the users entering the data should ultimately have access to anything they submit. Although downloadable data was part of our original plan for the platform rollout, we were unable to implement a ​“download data” button until late 2024. However, this functionality is now integrated into every program page.
4. Limited Filtering Functionality: The questions posed for each property in Main Street districts are designed to be readily selectable and filterable. At the original launch of the BOOMS Tracker, the data dashboards allowed users to selectively filter properties shown on the map only by their use and vacancy status. However, an update in late 2024 added additional filters related to property maintenance, ownership, height, and business use. 

Three Small and Three Big Updates on the Way for BOOMS

We proudly celebrate our successes in the first year of BOOMS, but we also want to keep improving the platform. Here are some updates you can look forward to soon.

FAQs and Ways to Use BOOMS Data: In the next few weeks, we will add a new page to the BOOMS Tracker site: responses to your frequently asked questions (FAQs). We will also begin incorporating more messaging about ways to use your BOOMS Tracker data for policy advocacy, promotion of activation, development, or ownership opportunities, and facilitation of storefront-business matchmaking. 

Incentives for Completing Your BOOMS Inventory: Completing your property inventory in BOOMS is fast and easy, but we know how intense being a local leader of a Main Street program can be. Our 2025 Directors Survey results made that very clear. To offer a ​“carrot” for working to 100%, we will soon offer incentives for completion in BOOMS. (To programs already at 100%: Don’t worry, we’ll also include you in these benefits.) What can the Research team offer that would be of most interest or use? Give us a shout with ideas on The Point!

Daylighting BOOMS imagery: This is more akin to the downloadable data challenge discussed above, but while we knew folks would want to download their data, we never imagined there would be so many beautiful images of older and historic buildings submitted via the BOOMS Tracker. We are working on making these extraordinary images more visible and accessible to you and your coordinating program with an attachment viewer carousel, which is coming soon.

Publicly-Viewable, Embeddable Dashboards: While you might think it’s great to have a quick view of your district’s property characteristics that you can personally show off to your boards or key constituents, we understand that you might also like to incorporate your BOOMS dashboard onto your program’s website, allowing you to showcase properties for sale or lease. We will soon begin setting up these public-facing dashboards for you to leverage as you see fit and when you’re ready.

BOOMS for Businesses: Main Street leaders are often tasked with keeping track of the buildings in their district, and the businesses that occupy and animate the spaces. In the months ahead, we plan to build an inventory component to match: a BOOMS Tracker for Businesses. With a short set of questions and the ability to drop a pin in your district where each business is based, we hope local leaders will find it to be an easy companion to use and track their business inventory alongside their buildings. 

Data Import: Since BOOMS was launched, we have heard from local leaders who already have a property inventory tabulated in Maestro, Excel, or another database tool. Creating an import tool for users to bring properties into the BOOMS Tracker automatically has been a vexing challenge for the MSA Research team and our GIS development partners. To get such a tool to work, we first need the existing property inventory records to have a field that perfectly matches the letters, numbers, spaces, and formatting in a field in the underlying BOOMS database. If there is a match, we also need to be sure the existing inventory fields can be ported neatly into the BOOMS fields. An existing field indicating that 50% of a building is vacant would have to be translated to ​“partially vacant” in the BOOMS data. We cannot promise this update will come, but we are committed to exploring whether it’s possible.

Looking Forward to Year Two

Though it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows for the BOOMS Tracker, we are incredibly proud of what we built in BOOMS and what the network has accomplished with the platform. The MSA Research team is small, but mighty. When we’re slow to respond, know we are doing our best. Thank you for your patience and your participation! Please let us know on The Point whether and how BOOMS works for you, one year in.

Downtown Decorations, a Main Street America Allied Member, is this quarter’s Main Spotlight advertiser. For more information about what they do to support Main Street organizations, click here.