SAN FRANCISCO — It’s a seller’s market for drycleaning stores, although there are indications of trouble on the horizon, according to BizBuySell, an online business-for-sale marketplace.
BizBuySell recently completed its Insight Report, an economic indicator that tracks the health of the U.S. small-business economy, for the third quarter. Each quarter, the company analyzes the sales and listing prices of small businesses across the United States based on more than 50,000 businesses for sale and those recently sold.
The key metrics used to determine small-business valuations are on the rise, the company says. Year over year, the average revenue multiplier for closed transactions jumped 7.9% from 0.64 to 0.69. The average cashflow multiplier for those same transactions jumped by the same percentage from 2.57 to 2.77 year over year.
That means that owners selling can get more money today for each dollar of revenue or cashflow than they did one year ago, BizBuySell explains. That’s good news for anybody looking to cash out.
In the third quarter, BizBuySell facilitated the sale of 71 drycleaning/laundry businesses. The median sale price was $188,000. For these transactions, the average sale-price-to-asking-price ratio was .93. The median revenue was $200,000, and median cashflow was $66,273.
Based on the data, the average multiplier of revenues is .85 while the average multiplier of cashflows is 2.75, BizBuySell reports.
BizBuySell's data is based on actual sales as reported by business brokers, not on for-sale listings.
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