Parcel search

Parcel search is what Pillar is best at. The filter bar on the map exposes every attribute we have indexed on the nationwide parcel dataset, and the result set updates live as you tweak them.

The big filters#

Geography#

Start every search with geography. You can narrow by:

• State — pick one or many.
• County — within a state, pick one or many counties.
• City or municipality.
• ZIP code.
• Custom polygon — draw directly on the map; nothing outside the shape is included.

Geography is compositional: you can combine a drawn polygon with a county filter to get "parcels in this polygon, but only within Travis County."

Size#

• Acres — min and max.
• Square feet — same, for smaller infill parcels.
• Lot frontage — where reported by the county.

Land use#

Pillar normalizes county-level land-use codes into a consistent taxonomy:

• Vacant (residential, commercial, industrial)
• Single-family residential
• Multi-family residential
• Commercial (retail, office, hospitality, etc.)
• Industrial
• Agricultural
• Institutional / government

Zoning#

If your county has zoning data enabled on your subscription, you can filter by zoning district. See Zoning data for how zoning access works.

Sale history#

• Last sale date — before/after or between.
• Last sale price — range.
• Never sold — flag for parcels with no recorded sale.

Owner#

• Owner name contains — full-text match against the record owner.
• Owner type — individual, LLC, corporation, trust, government.
• Out-of-state owner — the owner's mailing address is in a different state from the parcel.
• Absentee owner — the owner's mailing address differs from the parcel address.

Assessed value#

• Total assessed value — range.
• Land value / improvement value — filter on the split to find land-heavy vs. improvement-heavy parcels.

Year built#

Range filter. Useful for "built before the zoning change" searches.

Combining filters#

Filters are ANDed together. Every filter you add narrows the result set further. Inside a single filter — say, multiple zoning districts — values are ORed (any matching district counts).

Negative filters#

Some filters support exclusions:

• Exclude land use: institutional — remove schools, churches, and municipal parcels from the results.
• Exclude owner type: government — drop publicly-owned land.

Look for the toggle inside each filter that says "Include" vs. "Exclude."

A note on large parcels#

Parcel search uses a centroid point (not the full polygon) for performance reasons. A very large parcel whose centroid falls outside your drawn polygon will be excluded from the results, even if part of the parcel overlaps.

Saving your search#

Every filter combination can be saved as a list. Click Save as list in the top right of the filter bar. Lists stay in sync with the filter — if you add this as a dynamic list, future parcel data changes will flow into it automatically. See Creating lists.

Performance#

Pillar renders parcels as vector tiles, so the map stays smooth even when your filter matches hundreds of thousands of parcels. If you see slow rendering:

• Zoom out — above a certain density, we cluster parcels into aggregate counts per tile.
• Tighten your geography — filtering to a single county before adding finer filters is usually faster than the reverse.