What the biggest agency in London looked for when it bought mine

Last week I completed the sale of my agency to the biggest agency in London. Eighteen years, 3,000 homes sold, 427 managed properties at the peak. I am not going to tell you the number. I am going to tell you what they looked at, because it was not what I expected.

They did not care about my awards

We had 28 of them. They were nice to have on the wall and they helped us win instructions. The buyer barely mentioned them. Awards tell a buyer you were good at winning awards. They do not tell a buyer the business will still make money when you have gone.

They cared about the managed book, line by line

The lettings portfolio was the business as far as they were concerned. Not the headline number, the detail. How long each landlord had been with us. How many properties each one had. What fee we charged, and whether it was written down and signed. Whether the tenancies were compliant. One landlord with forty properties on a handshake is a risk. Forty landlords with one property each on signed terms is an asset.

They cared whether it ran without me

The first question in the first meeting was, more or less, what happens if you get hit by a bus. If the honest answer is that the business stops, the buyer is not buying a business. They are buying a job, and they will pay you like it.

We had a manager who ran lettings, a manager who ran sales, written processes, and systems with the data in them rather than in my head. That is what let the buyer see a business they could plug in rather than a founder they had to keep.

They cared about the last three years, not the last three months

A good quarter does not move the price. Three years of steady, boring, predictable numbers do. If you are thinking of selling in two years, start making the numbers boring now.

What I would tell you

If you own an agency and you ever want to sell it, work on three things: signed terms with every landlord, a team that can run the place for a month without you, and three clean years of accounts. Everything else is decoration.

If you want to know where your agency stands today, take the Owners’ Score. It is free, it takes three minutes, and it will tell you which of those three things is holding your price down.