[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.