State of the Business Sales Market 15th to 28th February 2013

Surprisingly the amount of enquiries we have received for February is slightly lower than the number we experienced in January. Please keep in mind the figures from January are a little skewed due to the fact leads from the Xmas break are included in January figures, ie a lead on the 25th of December will be recorded as a January enquiry. However, you can still see that the number of enquiries are still far higher than those in November and December 2012.

Unfortunately we do not have a graph to represent the number of ‘Deposits’ or ‘Offer and Acceptances’ we have received this month, I feel producing such a report could be misleading due to the fact no business is actually sold until it settles. However I can indicate that by comparison we have experienced a very large number of offers on businesses for the month of February. This reassures me that confidence in small business is continuing to improve as consumers become increasingly confident in investing in themselves and in small businesses. Lenders, competing in the commercial space, also appear to help grow the business sales market as there is an increase in the number of prospects that now have access to finance that previously was non-existent. Whilst we are a long way from it at the moment, for the first time in a long time ongoing growth in confidence just may push the price of small businesses up.