Core concepts

If you know what an "organization," a "project," and a "layer" mean in Pillar, you'll have a much easier time navigating the rest of the docs. This page is a glossary with context.

Organizations#

An organization is the unit of billing and collaboration in Pillar. Every user belongs to at least one organization; most belong to one. Everything you create — lists, projects, saved parcels, mail campaigns — belongs to your org, not to you personally.

Organizations have:

• A subscription tier (monthly or annual) that controls which features are available.
• A credit balance that gets consumed by certain actions (skip tracing, bulk contact lookup, agent calls).
• A set of county zoning entitlements — zoning access is sold per county as an annual add-on.
• Members, each with a role (Admin or Member).

Members and roles#

Members are the users inside your organization. Two roles exist today:

• Admin — can invite and remove members, change the subscription, buy credits, and manage county zoning entitlements.
• Member — full access to the product, but cannot change billing or membership.

Every organization needs at least one admin. See Team & roles.

Credits#

Credits are the metered currency for actions that have a per-unit marginal cost — things like skip tracing a parcel owner or asking the AI agent to run a complex research task. They sit on top of your subscription, which already covers parcel search, map access, saved lists, and the CRM.

• Subscriptions come with a monthly credit allowance.
• If you use more, you can top up from the Account → Credits page.
• Unused subscription credits don't roll over; top-up credits do.

See Credits for the full table of what costs what.

Parcels#

A parcel is a single tax-assessed land record. Pillar maintains a nationwide parcel dataset that's refreshed regularly from public sources. Every parcel has:

• A geometry (usually a polygon, sometimes a point for very large parcels — see the note on pc_point_wkt below).
• An owner — the record owner as reported by the county.
• Attributes — size, land use, assessed value, last sale date, year built, and dozens more, depending on what the county publishes.

Layers#

A layer is a dataset you can overlay on the map — traffic counts, school districts, flood zones, demographics, utility substations, and so on. Layers help you understand a parcel in context.

Layers fall into two buckets:

• Community layers — included with your subscription. See the full list under Community layers.
• Zoning layers — sold per county on an annual basis. See Zoning data.

Lists#

A list is a saved group of parcels. You can build a list by:

• Saving a filter (the list stays in sync with the filter — any parcel matching the filter is in the list).
• Saving an explicit selection (the list is a fixed set of parcels you picked).
• Saving from a bulk action (e.g., "save all parcels in this drawn polygon").

Lists live under the Lists workspace and can be exported to CSV or pushed into a project.

Projects#

A project is a single site, deal, or initiative you're tracking. It has:

• One or more parcels attached.
• A pipeline stage (Prospect, Qualified, Under Contract, Closed, etc.).
• Tasks and notes.
• Contacts (from skip tracing or added manually).
• Outreach history (letters sent, responses received).

Projects are the CRM layer of Pillar. See Projects pipeline.

The agent#

The agent is an AI assistant that lives inside the app and can run workflows on your behalf — market research, list building, competitive analysis. It's built on Claude, runs in an isolated sandbox per session, and consumes credits. See Agent overview.

What's next#

With the vocabulary down, the rest of the docs will read more quickly. Jump to whichever section matches what you're trying to do.