You've signed up. You're looking at the dashboard. Now what?
This walkthrough covers the core sourcing workflow in SpanVor — the process of going from a blank search to a prioritized list of target properties in a specific market. It's designed for brokers, acquisitions analysts, and investors who work in the small-bay industrial segment and want to see what structured property intelligence looks like in practice.
The entire workflow takes about 30 minutes. By the end, you'll have a curated list of properties that match your criteria, with ownership intelligence and scoring attached to each one.
Step 1: Define Your Market (Minutes 1-3)
Start at the search page. The first decision is geography.
SpanVor covers 1.2 million+ properties across the United States, so you'll need to narrow down. You can search by metro area, county, or draw a custom boundary on the map.
If you've got a specific thesis — say, you want to evaluate small-bay properties in the I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio — zoom the map to that area. If you're doing a broader market scan, start with a metro and refine later.
For this walkthrough, let's use Dallas-Fort Worth as our market. It's one of the deepest small-bay markets in the country, with over 100,000 commercial and industrial properties in SpanVor's database.
Step 2: Apply Size and Property Type Filters (Minutes 3-7)
With your geography set, apply your building criteria. The most important filters for small-bay sourcing are:
Building size. Set your minimum and maximum square footage. A typical small-bay search might target 10,000 to 60,000 SF, but adjust based on your mandate. If you're looking for multi-tenant flex buildings, you might go wider. If you're targeting single-tenant shallow-bay, you might be more precise.
Building category. Filter for industrial, flex, warehouse, or specific subcategories. SpanVor classifies properties using publicly available data and building characteristics, so you can isolate the product type you care about.
Year built. If you're targeting value-add opportunities, older buildings — say, pre-2000 — are more likely to have deferred maintenance and below-market rents. If you want stabilized, lower-risk assets, filter for newer construction.
At this point, you should see a filtered list of properties on your screen. In a market like DFW, you might still be looking at several thousand results. That's normal — the next steps will narrow the list significantly.
Step 3: Filter by Ownership Characteristics (Minutes 7-12)
This is where SpanVor's ownership intelligence becomes the differentiator. Generic CRE platforms give you a building list. SpanVor gives you a building list with normalized ownership data attached to every record.
Owner type. Filter for individual owners, entity owners (LLCs, corporations), or both. If you're sourcing off-market deals, individual owners and small LLCs are often more approachable than institutional holders. If you're looking for portfolio acquisitions, entity-owned properties may indicate a more sophisticated seller.
Absentee owners. Toggle the absentee filter to see only properties where the owner's mailing address differs from the property address. Absentee ownership is one of the strongest signals for potential seller motivation — an owner who lives 500 miles away from their industrial building is, statistically, more likely to consider selling than a local owner-operator.
Portfolio size. If SpanVor shows that an owner holds multiple properties, that context changes your approach. A single-property owner might sell because they want to simplify. A multi-property owner might sell a non-core asset while retaining their best holdings. Either way, knowing the portfolio context before you pick up the phone is a real advantage.
After applying ownership filters, your list should be substantially smaller — perhaps a few hundred properties. These are properties that match your building criteria and your ownership criteria simultaneously.
Step 4: Review and Score (Minutes 12-20)
Now you shift from filtering to evaluating. SpanVor assigns composite scores to properties based on a combination of building characteristics, ownership profile, location quality, and census demographics. The score isn't a buy/sell recommendation — it's a prioritization tool that helps you allocate your time.
Sort by score to see which properties rank highest against a balanced set of criteria. Or, if you weight certain factors more heavily — for example, if absentee ownership matters more to you than building age — adjust your view accordingly.
For each property in your top results, review the detail view. Here's what to look at:
Building details. Square footage, year built, lot size, assessed value, and any available building characteristics (clear height, dock doors, building class). Confirm these match your investment criteria.
Ownership profile. Who owns this property? Is it an individual or an entity? How many other properties do they own? Where's their mailing address relative to the property? This context shapes your outreach strategy.
Location context. Look at the property on the map. What's nearby? Is it in an active industrial corridor or an isolated location? Are there complementary businesses that suggest healthy tenant demand?
Census data. SpanVor enriches properties with census demographic data — median income, population density, and other indicators within a defined radius. This helps you understand the labor pool and consumer base surrounding the property.
Spend a few minutes on each of your top-scoring properties. Some will confirm your interest. Others will reveal disqualifying factors the filters didn't catch. That's the point — structured review replaces the hours of manual research you'd otherwise spend on each property.
Step 5: Build Your Target List (Minutes 20-25)
By now, you should have identified 10 to 25 properties that genuinely fit your criteria — the right size, the right age, the right ownership profile, in the right location. These are your targets.
For each property on your list, note:
- The property address and key building stats
- The owner name and type
- Whether the owner is absentee
- The owner's portfolio size (if they hold multiple properties)
- Your prioritization notes — why this property made the cut
This is your actionable sourcing list. Every property on it has been screened against your building criteria, filtered by ownership characteristics, scored for prioritization, and reviewed for fit. The equivalent manual process — downloading public records, building spreadsheets, researching ownership — would've taken days or weeks to produce the same output.
Step 6: Plan Your Next Steps (Minutes 25-30)
With your target list in hand, you've got several options:
Direct outreach. For the highest-priority targets, prepare owner outreach. Use the ownership intelligence to personalize your approach — reference their portfolio, acknowledge their holding period, and make a specific case for why now might be the right time to explore a transaction.
Market drive. Select 10 to 15 properties from your list and plan a drive route. Seeing the properties in person is irreplaceable for assessing condition, occupancy, tenant quality, and neighborhood dynamics. But now you're driving a curated route, not wandering a market hoping to spot something.
Expand or refine. If your target list is too short, loosen your filters. If it's too long, tighten them. Try different ownership criteria. Explore adjacent submarkets. The search is fast enough that you can iterate in minutes.
Compare markets. If you're evaluating multiple metros, repeat this workflow for your other target markets. Having a consistent, data-driven process across geographies lets you make apples-to-apples comparisons.
What You Just Did
In 30 minutes, you went from a blank screen to a prioritized list of small-bay industrial properties that match your specific investment or brokerage criteria, with ownership intelligence attached to each one. You screened an entire market — not a sample, not the properties that happened to be listed, but the full universe of properties in your target geography.
That's the value of structured property intelligence. Not a magic shortcut to closed deals, but a systematic process that replaces weeks of manual research with minutes of informed analysis.
Go run a search and see what your market looks like. Takes about two minutes to get your first results back.