State of the Business Sales Market 1st to 15th January 2013

I hope you enjoyed a well-deserved break over the Christmas and New Year period.  Our office is back and ready for what I believe will be a far better year in terms of business sales.
As we only re-opened our office yesterday, we do not have available a graph of stats to show you but there are positive signs in the amount of general enquiries about business sales.
In 2013 you will see a continuation of our online and social media campaign which has shown to be very successful in the later part of 2012.  By monitoring the stats on our websites we can see that the creation of our four divisions in the BF Brokers Group has been successful in attracting people to our websites.  For example, we can see some people whom have initially enquired about finance have also clicked to see what businesses we have for sale.
People often ask me, ‘Do the recent job losses have an effect on business sales?’  I can only speak of my experience which is that it does not have a great effect.  I can remember discussing with my father (also a director and Business Broker) around the time the GFC hit and we were expecting a lot of businesses to sell due to people unfortunately losing their jobs and not quite ready for retirement.
As we now know this was not to be the case due to two main reasons.  Financial institutions retracted their lending thus it was harder for buyers to obtain the required finance and those that lost their jobs had no or limited confidence in business and thus tried to invest in less risky strategies.  It is this lack of confidence in the economy, I believe, is now slowly beginning to heal and people are feeling more confident about going into business for themselves.  Hence I don’t expect the recent job losses in Victoria to have a big impact on business sales.
The whispers from economist is of another rate cut early 2013 which will most likely further enhance the business sales market.