Buying a hotel or guest house in Britain: what to check

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A British hotel or guest house for sale is usually a building with a trade inside it. So you check two things, in two different ways: the building as a building, and the trade as a trade.

The numbers below come from our count of one British business-for-sale portal on 12 September 2026, published in Buying a Small Business in Britain, a book by Grig Lien. They are asking prices, the prices sellers wrote, not the prices buyers paid. And it is one portal out of at least five, read on one day.

In short: four things before you pay

Find out whether the building is in the price: freehold (you own the building) or leasehold (you rent it for a set number of years).
Check the building with a survey and a valuation, as you would a house.
Check the trade with sales by month for three years, not three yearly totals.
Line up the licence transfer and the fire risk assessment for your first day.

General information, not legal or tax advice. The licensing and fire rules below are for England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own.

What the adverts asked

Trade	Adverts read	With a price	Median asking price	Middle half of prices	Median stated turnover	Adverts naming a turnover
Hotels and motels	100	94	£597,000	£396,250 to £953,750	£110,000	30 of 100
Guest houses and B&Bs	100	97	£550,000	£395,000 to £875,000	£100,000	35 of 100

Our count, one portal, 12 September 2026. The median is the middle price: half the adverts asked more, half asked less.

A hotel here is asked at more than five times its takings, comparing the median price with the median turnover. A pub on the same portal is asked at about half its takings (median asking price £250,000 against median turnover £480,000; only 17 of 67 pubs named a turnover). A hotel's price follows the building: of the 100 hotel adverts, 79 say freehold; of the 100 guest house adverts, 74 do. You are paying mostly for bricks.

Read the turnover column with its sample beside it. Only 30 hotels and 35 guest houses named a turnover at all. The direction is clear; the exact multiple is not.

The building: check it as a house

When the freehold is in the price, most of your money goes into one building in one town. The questions are the ones a house buyer asks, plus a few.

A survey. Roof, boiler, damp, wiring, fire doors. A building that sleeps guests has more of all of them than a house.
A valuation of the building on its own. Then you can see how much of the price is left for the trade.
The living quarters. 57 of the 100 guest house adverts and 48 of the 100 hotel adverts include living accommodation. Part of the price is then your home. If you live there, the "profit" and your rent are the same money.
If the advert does not say freehold, assume leasehold and ask. Then the lease, with its years left and its assignment clause, matters as much as the trade.

The trade: thirty-six months, not three years

A guest house does not earn evenly. One guest house advert in our sample says it opens its rooms for five months of the year. Its turnover may be a five-month figure described as a year.

So ask for sales by month, from the booking or till system, for three years. Then look at three things:

the lowest three months of each year: that is the cash you need in the bank to get through them;
whether the low months are the same each year: if they are, it is a season; if they move, ask why;
the last twelve months against the twelve before.

Then match the sales to the bank statements and to the accounts the seller files. Of the 1,222 adverts across twenty trades that we read on the same portal that day, ten mentioned a season at all.

The licence and the fire assessment

What	The rule	What it means for you
Premises licence, if the bar sells alcohol	You apply to the council, the licensing authority, for the transfer of the licence to you. You must be 18 or over and, for alcohol, entitled to work in the UK. The application goes with the licence itself. The police may object within 14 days, in exceptional circumstances, on crime-prevention grounds	Ask the seller for the licence and for consent to the transfer. With the holder's consent, you can ask for the transfer to take effect at once, while the council decides
Fire risk assessment	The "responsible person" is the employer or the person who controls the premises for the business. That person must make a "suitable and sufficient assessment" of the fire risks, review it after significant changes, and keep a record of it	From the day you take control, the duty is yours. Ask for the seller's assessment and its record, then review it with the building in front of you

Sources: Licensing Act 2003, s 42 and s 43; Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, art. 3 and art. 9.

What to ask the seller, in writing

Is the building in the price? If it is a lease: how many years are left, and what does the lease need for it to pass to me?
Please send sales by month for the last three years, from the booking or till system, and the filed accounts for the same years.
How many rooms are let, and in which months of the year?
Who holds the premises licence, and will you consent to its transfer to me?
Please send the fire risk assessment, its record and the date of its last review.

Before any of this: the listing

A hotel advert may give the price and the number of rooms and leave out the rest. Our free extension for Chrome and Edge reads a business-for-sale listing. "Open a business-for-sale listing and press “Download PDF”. You get a report on the 12 things a check of the business needs: what the listing says about each, and which ones it does not say." "Each line shows what the listing says, with amounts in the listing’s own currency." "The extension does not guess: when the page is not clear, the line says “not stated”." Each "not stated" is a question for the seller.

Your next three steps

The extension. Add to Chrome — free or Add to Edge — free. Reading on your phone? Open this page on your computer. More on our extension page.
Your account. "Saving a listing takes a My list account. In it, the listings you save from different sites sit in one place." Create my account.
The check, for the business you would put a deposit on. From our pricing page: "€550: from the public records, which debts can follow the business under the rules that apply where it is, and what decides whether the permit and lease pass to you". It needs "enough to identify the business — its legal name, its registration or tax number, or its trade name and town." Start for €550. "€950: everything in the €550 report, plus the seller's figures checked against the seller's own papers — tax returns or the accounts the company filed." Start for €950. "Your report comes in your language: any of 181, chosen on the order form." "We do not contact the seller." "You pay only if we take it on." Within 12 weeks of receiving the €550 report, pay the price difference for the €950 report: what you paid counts in full.

For the whole method in Britain, from the price to the register, read Buying a Small Business in Britain, a book by Grig Lien.

See a sample report Start my check

Sources

Buying a Small Business in Britain, a book by Grig Lien, chapters 1, 2, 2b, 3 and 4 (our count of one portal, 12 September 2026) (retrieved 2 November 2026)
Licensing Act 2003, section 42, Application for transfer of premises licence (legislation.gov.uk) (retrieved 2 November 2026)
Licensing Act 2003, section 43, Circumstances in which transfer application given interim effect (legislation.gov.uk) (retrieved 2 November 2026)
Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, article 3, Meaning of responsible person (legislation.gov.uk) (retrieved 2 November 2026)
Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, article 9, Risk assessment (legislation.gov.uk) (retrieved 2 November 2026)
Provenance Diligence, Free extension (retrieved 2 November 2026)
Provenance Diligence, Pricing (retrieved 2 November 2026)

Buying a hotel or guest house in Britain: you are pricing a building first