[davidsojevic]

I've been working on a "businesses for sale" aggregation/search engine that sources data from all of the major "business for sale" type platforms in Australia and de-duplicates listings, extracts data like revenue/profit/etc, and normalises it all for quick browsing.

I have a couple of family members and friends who are looking to buy businesses (separately), and it's been much more time-consuming than you'd expect just to browse through listings to determine if they're relevant to you or not.

The platforms seem to mostly follow the same format as real estate listings (as the brokers seemingly rely on the same software/data formats), with one big blob of freeform text that contains the various information that you'd ideally just be reading at a glance.

Add to the fact that there are over 15 "business for sale" type platforms in Australia where they have a minimum of 1,000 listings and at least 10 platforms with between 100-1,000 listings, you can easily burn hours looking through them individually.

I'm currently covering 12 of the top 15 (ranked by number of listings they contain) platforms and I just tinker away once or twice a month, adding support for new platforms.

I should probably release it and get some feedback at some point, but I suffer a bit from "it needs more polish before I let people other than my family and friends use it"

[ajb]

When a previous employer went bust, it was bought by the CEO after being listed by the administrator on an obscure website (ip-bid.com) which you have to make an account and log in to just to see the listings. There was only one bid. (I leave to the reader to speculate on the utility of a bid website without public listings, but such listings might represent good value compared to those advertised more widely). It may be worth checking company filings to see if there are equivalents used by insolvency administrators in Australia (I found out only by reading the administrator's "statement of proposals" on the fillings website after the fact -the sale wasn't advertised anywhere else as far as I can tell).

[davidsojevic]

We have ASIC (Australian Securities & Investments Commission) that handles company registrations, notices, etc. and they maintain a register of insolvency notices and liquidations.

This can be a reasonable place to go to look for distressed businesses/assets too and I've considered using them as a source with my aggregation/search engine, though they don't really have the same type of information as a business for sale listing so they fall somewhat outside of the main type of results that I otherwise display.

Other reasonable places I've seen too, though in incredibly low volumes (think 0-3 listings a month), are commercial auction houses/sites where they'll list a business for sale or the full assets of a business. The main issue with that it is that they're so low volume that I'm not sure it's worth spending the time ingesting them this early on while there's still many other larger listing sources.

[ajb]

Makes sense.

In my ex-employers case, the sale was what's called a "pre-pack" sale. That means the sale was advertised and proposed before the administrator were appointed and the administration was noticed. So you would not have found out in time from the filings, only from ip-bid.com. I don't know if Australian law allows pre-packs.

[conductr]

If it’s anything like the US, the listings only represent a minority of what’s available for sale and buyers are better off hiring a broker. If you could find a way to have majority of everyone actually list things for sale online, I think you’d have a solid business.

[davidsojevic]

In Australia, brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.

There's just shy of 90,000 unique listings I'm tracking (i.e. after de-duplication) on these platforms.

On the traditional classifieds sites and things like Facebook groups focusing on these, there's a significantly smaller number of listings/ads for business sales (e.g. a couple of thousand).

I think where there are definitely hidden gems is where there are many small business owners at or close to retirement age where they haven't planned for a sale at all. For example, a family member nearing retirement age has a small business they're just intending to shut down because they "couldn't be bothered" selling it. I've heard people have had reasonable success just approaching local businesses like this that have older owners OR asking accountants if they have any clients that are thinking of selling.

[conductr]

> brokers need to be licenced real estate agents (even as a buyers agent in many states), so I suspect there's a relatively decent culture of people who are serious about selling their business going through brokers and resulting in listings on at least one of the major platforms.

Works like this in US too. Commercial brokers rely on their network and not listing things on a market. Even most commercial real estate property for sale in the US is unlisted. It’s a weird industry, there are listings site but they only reflect a minor percentage of what you’d find if you drive around looking at for sale signs.

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

Living in Australia and interested in buying a business, I can attest to biz4sale-type sites being a real problem.

[davidsojevic]

If you're interested in giving the tool a shot, feel free to shoot me an email (take my username and insert an @ after david and a .com at the end) and I'll happily give you access after I get it up somewhere publicly accessible -- possibly in the next couple of weeks.

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

email sent!