{"id":3069,"date":"2020-05-19T22:06:19","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T21:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/?p=3069"},"modified":"2020-05-20T11:49:59","modified_gmt":"2020-05-20T10:49:59","slug":"itabb-market-intelligence-may-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/itabb-market-intelligence-may-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"iTABB Market Intelligence – May 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u200bMarket Intelligence – Small & Micro Businesses, May 2020<\/h1>\n

For details on the source of this data and on our market intelligence project, please visit this page<\/a>. Want to use these images on your site, or have us create other graphs for you from our data? \u200bThey are available without the watermark in exchange for a link back from your site to acknowledge the source. \u200bRequest copies or unique graphical data\u200b<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

This month we review three of the best known UK marketplaces to list a business for sale: Daltons Business <\/span><\/a><\/span>Rightbiz<\/span><\/a><\/span>BusinessesForSale<\/span><\/a><\/span>While we have data on the other portals, we are examining just these three today. Caveats on the below data at the bottom of this page<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Number of businesses per asking price (bands with range of \u00a3100K)<\/h2>\n

At BusinessesForSale.com:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Daltons Business:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Rightbiz:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

Caveats: Listings above \u00a31 million have been excluded as they form such a tiny fraction. The three platforms show roughly the same spread with about 55%-60% of listings having an asking price of under \u00a3100K, and about 75% of listings falling under the 250K mark. As is obvious from the table below, Daltons and Rightbiz are roughly the same size in terms of number of listings with both boasting about 17,000 listings each (excluding the “new franchise” and other listings that are not businesses for sale). BusinessesForSale is the smallest at a little over half the number of listings at the other two sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n

\u200bASKING PRICE BANDS<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/th>\n

\n

\u200bBusinesses For Sale.com<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/th>\n

\n

Daltons<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/th>\n

\n

RIGHTBIZ<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n

\n

\u200b\u00a30k – \u00a3100k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b5,104<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b10,192<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b9,692<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3100k – \u00a3200k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b1,697<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b3,076<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b2,817<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3200k – \u00a3300k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b903<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b1,517<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b1,407<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3300k – \u00a3400k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b622<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b996<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b946<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3400k – \u00a3500k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b407<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b640<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b597<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3500k – \u00a3600k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b290<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b485<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b442<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3600k – \u00a3700k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b193<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b317<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b278<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3700k – \u00a3\u200b800k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b175<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b228<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b215<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3800k – \u00a3900k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b101<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b150<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b149<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a3900k – \u00a31000k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b83<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b156<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b138<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200b\u200b\u00a31000k – \u00a3100k<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b16<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b28<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b27<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

\u200bTOTAL<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b9,591<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b17,785<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

\u200b16,708<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Businesses for sale by sector<\/h2>\n

At BusinessesForSale.com:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Daltons Business:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Rightbiz:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

Interestingly, they don\u2019t all seem to attract the same kind of businesses. The most popular sector at businessesforsale was retail followed by food. At Daltons it was services followed by food. Rightbiz is the only one where food was the most popular sector.<\/p>\n

\u200bAverage asking prices by sector<\/h2>\n

\u200bThe highest average in Daltons seems to be for technology businesses while it\u2019s hotels\/hospitality for the other two. Hotels\/hospitality makes sense as being the most expensive –  they often come with freeholds, but why is Daltons showing a \u00a31m average price for tech businesses? Is Daltons the go to site for large tech businesses? Unfortunately, no. Daltons figures are being skewed by a single Midlands based software business listed by ETS Corporate<\/a>\u200b. This is a business with \u00a3230K operating profit, \u00a3700K in assets and an asking price of \u00a35.5m. Given the low number of tech businesses at Daltons, this one listing has skewed the average for tech businesses at this site. If that business is removed Daltons, too, has hotels and hospitality as the top sector.Averages are terrible, aren\u2019t they? Next time medians. Maybe.<\/p>\n

At BusinessesForSale.com:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Average<\/span><\/p>\n

At Daltons Business:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Average<\/span><\/p>\n

At Rightbiz:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Average<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bWhich business brokers are listing the most businesses? <\/h2>\n

At BusinessesForSale.com:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u200bWe’ve included only the top 30 brokers on each platform. There are numerous brokers in the tail, some with just 2-3 listings each. Including them all would have made these charts unreadable.<\/p>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Daltons Business:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

Rightbiz does not disclose to the general public the name of the broker behind each listing. So we found another way to get the names of the brokers behind listings. We are choosing to not disclose this data at this time. We may do so later. Hilton Smythe<\/span><\/a><\/span> are the clear winners at BusinessesForSale. Disclosure: Hilton Smythe are founding supporters<\/a> of this site. That doesn’t, of course, play any part in these stats.There are one or two known anomalies in the below data that we haven’t gotten around to cleaning yet, but they are broadly correct. Note that Knightsbridge \/ Knightsbridge Corporate are different companies but part of the same group. Bizdaq is not a broker but its own marketplace that “shares” its listings on other marketplaces. Entries like Business Partnership represent franchises. Their listings are accumulations of listings by all their franchisees. <\/p>\n

\u200bThe Top 30 Brokers <\/strong><\/p>\n

BusinessesForSale<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u200bDaltons Business<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u200bHilton SmytheKnightsbridgeIntelligent Business PartnersErnest Wilson Business AgentsKBS CorporateMeridian Business Sales LtdBlacks Business BrokersEverett Masson & FurbySidney PhillipsTransworld Business Brokers UKHarvey Silver HodgkinsonRosensIntelligent Business TransferBusiness PartnershipFleuretsDavey CoASG CommercialAdams & CoColliers InternationalNorth East CommercialSovereign Business Transfer LimitedVeritas Business SalesCornerstone Business SalesBradleys CountrywideRMS Estate AgentsCentral Business AgencyMiller CommercialCharles DarrowCCL Group LtdPaviour Property Services<\/p>\n

\u200b923895785768744541516499387275204202193191173171145135130124120119118107999889858480<\/p>\n

\u200bNationwide Businesses LtdKnightsbridgeIntelligent Business TransferRTAHilton SmytheKBS CorporateErnest WilsonBizdaqBlacks Business Brokers LimitedMeridian Business Sales LimitedRedwoodsDowlingKerrEverett Masson and FurbyKings Business TransferSidney PhillipsBruce & CoTransworld Business AdvisorsGolden Global Property LimitedLime Licensing GroupChaplin Bond LtdBusiness Broker SpainHarvey Silver HodgkinsonRosens BTA LimitedGuy SimmondsBar for Sale Spain?Business PartnershipHumberstonesBroomheads Commercial Estate AgentsTurner ButlerKenricks CommercialDavey Co<\/p>\n

\u200b1,4411,2791,1471,002999917758757548544521496478424309262249230225205204201200191187181181176174173<\/p>\n

\u200bYou can reach any of the above brokers by searching for their name in our directory<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u200b\u200bNumber of sectors per business<\/h2>\n

\u200bMost businesses will probably qualify for a listing under more than one sector. However, multiple sector listing happens the most with BusinessesForSale, a bit less with Daltons and when it comes to RightBiz, 75% of listings were featured in only one sector. From a buyer\u2019s point of view there seem to be both pros and cons to businesses listing in multiple sectors. Buyers sometimes complain that at businessesforsale vendors often list their business under unrelated sectors just to get more views \u2013 sector spam if you will! On the other hand, some buyers are interested in the wider sector and businesses that feature at the edge of that sector or arguably in multiple related sectors. <\/p>\n

At BusinessesForSale.com:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Daltons Business:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Rightbiz:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bBusinesses organised by net profit<\/h2>\n

We truncated all results at \u00a3200K. There were hardly any businesses worth mentioning that claimed a net profit of over \u00a3200K. All three platforms show a spike in the \u00a320K – \u00a330K range. Daltons and Rightbiz were tied with both showing 18% of their listings in this bracket, but at BFS 25% of the listings claimed a net profit of between \u00a320K and \u00a330K. <\/p>\n

At BusinessesForSale.com:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Daltons Business:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

At Rightbiz:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

One further graph on this \u2013 a consolidated one<\/p>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200b60% of businesses are claiming a net profit of between \u00a30 and \u00a350K, 27% claim a net profit of between \u00a350K and \u00a3100K and 8% claim \u00a3100K to \u00a3150K. 98.5% are claiming \u00a30 – \u00a3500K and 1.5% say their net profit is above \u00a3500K. <\/p>\n

Average asking prices as a multiple of turnover<\/h2>\n

Sellers at the lower end of the range seem to be more ambitious at Daltons with an average asking price of 2.6x turnover. At the other two locations it\u2019s roughly 2.2x turnover. In all cases, these smallest businesses seemed to have the highest price expectations (when calculated as a multiple of turnover).\u200bWe don’t need to emphasise that these are asking prices, not selling prices. Not all businesses will sell at the asking price, if any. \u200bSome businesses are over priced and won’t sell at all. In a future post we intend to analyse what percentage of businesses are still sitting on the shelf after 6 months, 12 months, 18 months. We may provide a breakdown by sector. It might be also interesting to analyse, sector by sector, at what multiple (of profit) businesses are getting de-listed (which suggests that they have successfully sold).\u200bWhile we produce asking price as a multiple of turnover, it\u2019s not an indication that turnover has any part to play in \u200bthe normal valuing of businesses. \u200bTurnover is vanity, profit is sanity<\/a>, as the old saying goes.\u200bAbout the below: We excluded businesses with turnover in excess of \u00a31m as they constitute a tiny minority of listings on these three platforms. We also excluded those businesses asking for 30x or more of their turnover.  A business with \u00a30 turnover (like the new franchise opportunities) but an asking price of \u00a320K or \u00a350K would be meaningless in these calculations.<\/p>\n

At BusinessesForSale.com:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Asking<\/span><\/p>\n

At Daltons Business:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Asking<\/span><\/p>\n

At Rightbiz:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Asking<\/span><\/p>\n

What about average asking prices as a multiple of net profit? Isn’t that how business values are normally quoted – multiple of EBITDA \/ profit \/ SDE? Maybe next time.<\/p>\n

Some other general eye candy<\/h2>\n

Net profit vs asking price<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Asking<\/span><\/p>\n

Most popular words<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"wordcloud\"<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bNumbers of businesses at various asking price intervals<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Number<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bWhat about the x, what about y? <\/h2>\n

\u200bWhat about asking prices by sector?  Are businesses in technology really asking for higher multiples than businesses in manufacturing?Do private sellers have higher price expectations (as a multiple of profit) than do business brokers? Which business brokers are asking for the highest multiples and what’s the average multiple they seek?Maybe next time. Thank you for reading.<\/p>\n

\u200bACKNOWLEDGEMENTS<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u200bAll the technology behind this market intelligence project \u200bwas created and managed by 17 year old Kaspar Lee. Congratulations, recommendations etc can be left for him at his LinkedIn profile: Kaspar Lee<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u200b.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u200bMarket Intelligence – Small & Micro Businesses, May 2020 For details on the source of this data and on our market intelligence project, please visit this page. Want to use these images on your site, or have us create other graphs for you from our data? \u200bThey are available without the watermark in exchange for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[365],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-market-intelligence"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3069"}],"version-history":[{"count":60,"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3158,"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions\/3158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itabb.org\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}