Before you buy that business

The advice to walk away is free, and useless

“People/families would continually come here with their retirement money and without any research or knowledge of running a bar would invest every penny they had in a bar.” — britishexpats.com, thread “Dont buy a bar in spain”, 1 December 2008.

“The worst mistake of my life. Don't think twice, think twenty times.” — r/askspain, “Buying/transferring a bar in Spain”: a buyer quoting the previous owner.

The forums all give the same answer. That advice is free, and it is useless — because it isn't about your listing. A lawyer will look at yours, weeks later, for four figures. Between those two doors there has been nothing.

What the date on a listing does not tell you

A marketplace may show the day a listing was last moved back to the top of the site, not the day it was first posted. A listing marked “today” may have first gone up long before.

So the date, and the time a listing has been up, tell you little about how long the sale will take or at what price it will close. That is why we do not stop at the listing: we work from the public records on the business itself.

Three fears, and what we do with each

About each one we say two things: what we look at, and what we do not. That second line almost never appears on a page that wants to sell you something.

“The seller has already hidden something”

We look at what the listing does not name — revenue, rent, floor area, licence, who is selling. We do not look at the seller's intent: we do not judge whether the seller is lying. We separate what they state from what they omit.

“The numbers won't add up”

We look for the same business on other sites and in old copies of the listing; where we find it, you see whether its figures differ from the listing's. Where the business's filed accounts are public, we set them beside the listing's figures. We read the seller's papers only for the €950 report; at €550 we do not.

“I'm buying from another country and trusting someone already there”

We look at the listing before you send anything. The reading reaches you and does not depend on someone on the ground explaining it. We do not look at people: we do not verify your partner, the broker, or the safety of a payment.

The same gaps, on the listing you are reading: get the free extension for Chrome and Edge.

If you are coming from outside the EU, the business is usually also your route to residency. That does not change what we read, but it raises the price of being wrong.

Where to start

Start with the browser extension. No account needed to read a listing.

Deeper: €550 against the public record, €950 against the seller's own documents. Send us the name and the town, and we answer whether we take it.