The business-for-sale index
Our own count of what sellers actually ask, in numbers. Listings are counted, not completed deals. Every number carries its sample, the whole set downloads as a file, and any of it may be republished.
Issue 1. Counted on 2 August 2026, prices recalculated 12–13 August. Spain, one marketplace.
In plain words. We counted the business-for-sale listings and published the whole count. Listings are counted, not completed deals.
Half of them have been for sale longer than 146 days. Ninety-six in a hundred look posted today.
Listings counted: 344. Both statements are true at the same time. The gap between them is the most useful thing to know when you open a listing.
| Age of the listing | Days |
|---|---|
| The freshest tenth — up to | 10 |
| The bottom quarter — up to | 54 |
| The middle | 146 |
| The top quarter starts at | 440 |
| The oldest tenth — from | 846 |
| The oldest listing | 3 918 |
A business quietly offered for four hundred days is not the same thing as one that appeared last week. And the price the seller will accept is rarely the same either. The listing does not tell you which of the two you are reading.
What listings state, and what they keep quiet about
Read line by line: 140 listings.
| What is stated | Share of listings |
|---|---|
| states_asking_price | 90 % |
| states_monthly_rent | 41 % |
| states_floor_area | 36 % |
| states_years_left_on_lease | 14 % |
| states_revenue | 10 % |
| states_profit | 1 % |
| states_employee_count | 0 % |
In plain words. Silence about the price is rare — that is worth asking about. Silence about profit is almost universal and means nothing on its own.
Take the numbers
The whole count is published as a file: 72 measures in CSV and in JSON. You may take it and republish it under the CC BY 4.0 licence — we only ask you to name the source.
- How to cite it
- Provenance Diligence, Spanish Business-Transfer Index, Issue 1, August 2026, revised 22 August 2026 — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22057897
- Permanent record address
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22057897
- What was counted
- Business-transfer advertisements on one Spanish classifieds marketplace. In the figures counted on 2 August 2026 the unit is the advertisement. In the asking-price figures, counted on 12 and 13 August 2026, advertisements judged to repeat one property are merged and counted once, so the unit there is a group of advertisements treated as one property. In neither case is the unit a completed sale.
- What was not counted
- Completed transactions, agreed prices, time to sale, and any business not advertised on that marketplace.
The next issue
Once a quarter. Issue 2 repeats the same measures so the movement between issues becomes visible.