The Business-Transfer Index
What sellers advertise when they put a small business up for transfer in Spain — how long the offers have really been up, what they state, what they leave out, who is behind them, and what they ask. This counts advertisements, not completed sales. Every figure below carries the number of listings it came from, and the whole set downloads as a table.
Half of them have been on sale longer than 146 days. Ninety-six per cent look like they went up today.
344 listings · counted 2 August 2026
Both sentences are true at once, and the gap between them is the most useful thing to know before opening a listing page. Almost everything on screen looks new. Almost nothing is.
| Age of the advertisement | Days |
|---|---|
| Newest tenth, up to | 10 |
| Lower quarter, up to | 54 |
| Middle (median) | 146 |
| Upper quarter starts at | 440 |
| Oldest tenth starts at | 846 |
| Oldest single listing | 3,918 |
63 per cent had been up longer than three months, 28 per cent longer than a year — and 96 per cent carried a refresh date of that day or the day before. When nearly every advertisement is refreshed daily, “posted 3 hours ago” separates nothing from anything.
A business quietly on offer for four hundred days is not the same proposition as one that came up last week, and the price a seller will accept is rarely the same either. The advertisement does not say which one you are reading.
What listings state — and which silence is actually unusual
140 listings read line by line · counted 2 August 2026
| Field | Share stating it | So a silence here is |
|---|---|---|
| Asking price | 90 % | unusual — worth asking |
| Monthly rent | 41 % | unusual — worth asking |
| Floor area | 36 % | common |
| Years left on the lease | 14 % | common |
| Revenue | 10 % | the norm of this section |
| Profit | 1 % | the norm of this section |
| Number of employees | 0 of 140 | nobody states it at all |
The instinct that a missing revenue figure is a warning sign reads this section backwards. Nine listings in ten stay silent about revenue and ninety-nine in a hundred about profit — that silence describes the section, not the seller in front of you. Not one listing in 140 gave a headcount.
The rent is the different case. It is withheld by the majority, so its absence is not remarkable either — but it is the one deal number this section is most willing to give: four times more listings state the rent than state revenue, and forty times more than state profit. The rent is also the price of the location, and the location is most of what is being sold.
You are mostly not writing to an owner
511 listings traced to 241 distinct seller accounts · counted 2 August 2026
| Who is behind the advertisements | Share of the 511 |
|---|---|
| From professional accounts rather than private owners | 81 % |
| From sellers running more than one listing at once | 62 % |
| Held by the ten largest sellers | 43 % |
| Listings run by the single largest seller | 105 |
This reframes the conversation a buyer thinks they are having. The person answering the message is usually an intermediary carrying an inventory, whose knowledge of the specific business behind the sign may go no deeper than the advertisement. It also explains why so many photographs show no shopfront: an intermediary has no reason to make a listing identifiable, and several reasons not to.
Asking prices, by trade
Counted section by section on 12–13 August 2026 · sample printed per row · these are asking prices, not agreed prices
| Trade | Middle half of asking prices | Middle | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bars | €35,000 – €116,250 | €60,000 | 64 |
| Restaurants | €69,000 – €195,000 | €129,000 | 153 |
| Bakeries | €31,000 – €95,000 | €63,000 | 97 |
| Hair salons | €15,000 – €43,000 | €26,500 | 99 |
| Vehicle workshops | €45,000 – €138,750 | €70,000 | 86 |
| Clinics | €77,500 – €350,000 | €200,000 | 67 |
| Nurseries | €25,000 – €77,500 | €40,000 | 31 |
| Money-transfer shops | €12,500 – €35,000 | €25,000 | 26 |
| Tobacconists | €160,000 – €325,000 | €225,000 | 157 |
| Dry cleaners and laundrettes (one portal section, two trades) | €32,500 – €75,000 | €40,000 | 33 |
| Academies and training centres (one portal section, several trades) | €15,000 – €60,000 | €25,000 | 45 |
| Food shops and supermarkets (about 44 % of the section read) | €14,675 – €38,873 | €24,950 | 164 |
| Everything else | €45,000 – €180,000 | €80,000 | 322 |
Three trades deliberately have no row. Pharmacies: only 13 of 157 pharmacy listings state a price at all, so a row would describe the few who talk rather than the section. Gyms: 20 priced listings, too few. Hotels and guesthouses: the portal keeps them in one section and asking prices there run from four figures to nine, so a middle of that is not a comparison. Those three are measured against “everything else”, and where that happens it is said on the line where it happens.
Position in a row is a fact. Whether a price is high or low for one particular business is not something a row can say, and this index does not say it.
The two measures that behave better than a raw price
| Measure | Middle half | Middle | Listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asking price per square metre, all trades | €333 – €1,223 | €633 | 243 |
| Asking price per square metre, bars and restaurants | €286 – €716 | €400 | 21 |
| Asking price in years of the annual rent on the premises | 3 – 8 years | 5 years | 54 |
Per square metre the middle half spans nearly four times, which shows how little a raw price per metre settles. The price expressed in years of the annual rent on the premises spans a factor of 2.7 instead, because rent is what the location costs — dividing by it strips out most of what makes two businesses incomparable. If one number is worth carrying into a conversation with a seller, it is this one. A transfer asking eleven years of rent is not improper; it is simply well outside what the rest of this section asks for the same kind of thing, and the seller should have an answer for it.
What this index is not
Stated plainly, because a count that hides its weaknesses is worth less than no count at all:
- It counts advertisements, not sales. Asking prices are what sellers ask, not what anyone paid. Time on the market is how long an offer has been exposed, not how long a business takes to sell — no completed sale was observed anywhere in this data.
- One marketplace. This is one Spanish classifieds platform, not the Spanish market. Portugal is not covered by this issue at all.
- Duplicates were not removed. Listings were counted, not premises. One property advertised by two intermediaries enters the count twice. With 81 per cent professional sellers and a largest seller running 105 listings, this is a real distortion, and its size has not been measured.
- Abandoned listings were not separated from live ones. The listing aged 3,918 days may not have been for sale for ten years — it may simply have been forgotten. The old end of the range is overstated by an unknown amount.
- Exposure, refresh, disclosure and seller figures come from a single day. Seasonality is not measured and could move several of them.
- Sectors are the platform’s own categories, which is why two rows above are a portal section rather than a trade, one row rests on about 44 per cent of its section, and three trades have no row at all.
Citing this
Journalists, brokers, buyers and researchers are welcome to quote any figure here, in any language, provided the sample size travels with it. A percentage without its sample size is an opinion wearing a number’s clothes, and that is how figures like these get misused.
The citation form is:
Provenance Diligence, Spanish Business-Transfer Index, Issue 1, August 2026
with a link to https://provenancediligence.com/transfer-index.html.
The figures are published under CC BY 4.0: reuse them, chart them, put them in a report — attribution and a link are the only condition. The CSV and JSON carry every figure with its sample size and the date it was counted, which is the form least likely to be quoted wrongly.
If you work in this market and want a particular cut — a city, a trade, a price band — write and say which, and it goes into the next issue if the sample supports it: contact.
Issues and method
Issue 2 is due in the autumn and repeats the same counts. Figures that move will be shown against Issue 1 rather than quietly replaced, and this page keeps the same address — so a link to it stays a link to the current issue.
Send us the listing you are looking at and it comes back placed against these numbers — how long it has really been up, where its asking price sits in its row, and what it does not say.