Enriching a list

A bare list has parcels and their public attributes — owner name, address, assessed value, sale history. To turn it into something you can actually reach out to, you need to enrich it.

What enrichment means#

In Pillar, enrichment is the process of looking up contact information for parcel owners — phone, email, and best-known mailing address. This is done via a skip-tracing provider and costs credits per record.

Running a skip trace#

1. Open the list.
2. Click Enrich → Skip trace all contacts.
3. Confirm the credit charge. Pillar tells you up front exactly how many credits will be spent and how many contacts we expect to find.
4. Wait for the job to finish. Small lists (under 500 parcels) complete in seconds; bigger lists may take a few minutes.

Once the job completes, every row with a successful trace gets phone, email, and mailing address columns filled in. Rows with no match show up highlighted so you can triage them separately.

Targeted vs. bulk skip trace#

If you only need contacts for a subset — say, the top 100 parcels ranked by acreage — select those rows in the list view and click Enrich → Skip trace selected. The rest of the list is left alone.

Owner deduplication#

One owner often owns multiple parcels. Before skip tracing, Pillar deduplicates on owner name + mailing address, so you're only billed once per unique owner even if they appear 20 times in the list. On the list view, you can toggle Group by owner to see the dedup'd version.

Exporting#

Open the list, select the parcels you want to export, then click Actions → Export. Pillar downloads a CSV named after the list and the export date. The export includes the core parcel fields shown in list workflows, including APN, owner, property address, county, acres, building square footage, year built, assessed values, last sale details, zoning, use description, tax amount, mailing address, and latitude / longitude. The CSV schema is stable across exports; you can build repeatable workflows against it.

For geospatial exports (GeoJSON, Shapefile, KML) see Bulk save.

Feeding into outreach#

The fastest path from an enriched list to a mail campaign:

1. Enrich the list with skip tracing.
2. Click Actions → Create outreach campaign from list.
3. Design the letter, choose an envelope, and confirm volume.

Pillar handles the mail merge, the print, and the postage. See Outreach & letters.

Re-running enrichment#

Owner contact information goes stale. You can re-run skip trace on an existing list — Pillar will only re-trace rows where the last trace is older than 90 days, to avoid duplicate charges.