FREE MARKET REPORT · WEEK OF OCTOBER 12
Acquire Scout’s Market Report, free in your inbox
Every industry’s median asking multiple, the spread around it, and who has been cutting their price.
- 9 industries
- 6,452 priced listings
- 10 marketplaces, named
Home & Trade Services
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping
By asking price
| Under $250K | 1.50× |
| $250K – $1M | 2.50× |
| Over $1M | 4.00× |
Sellers are moving
80% of the 100 listings that changed price in the last 90 days cut it. Median cut 15%.
Every page names its sources and counts them — which marketplace each listing came from, and how many.
These are asking prices, not sale prices. They are what sellers want, which is what you negotiate against.
This week, in four numbers
Rebuilt every Monday. The figures themselves are in the report.
THE HEADLINE
Median asking multiples ran between about 1.5× and 3.5× earnings this week, depending on the industry.
Which industry sits where — and how wide the spread is inside each one — is in the report.
AND THE ONE SELLERS DON’T ADVERTISE
Of the 1,484 who moved their asking price, 89% moved it down.
The same listings observed twice, not a fresh sample — so that is sellers actually dropping their number. By industry, in the report.
What’s in it
Asking prices, divided by the earnings each seller claims. Not sale prices — nobody has those — but the number you actually negotiate against.
EVERY INDUSTRY’S SPREAD
The median, the middle half, and the outer tenths. A median alone can’t tell you whether the deal in front of you is normal or greedy.
SPLIT BY DEAL SIZE
Under $250K, up to $1M, and above. A corner shop and a $2M operator are not the same market, and in some industries the gap is close to threefold.
WHO IS CUTTING, AND BY HOW MUCH
Per industry: the share of sellers who dropped their price, and the size of the typical cut. Worth knowing before you make an offer.
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How this is calculated
Each week we take every live listing across the marketplaces we cover, divide the asking price by the listing’s stated SDE, and report the distribution. Listings without both figures are excluded, as are implausible multiples that indicate a typo rather than a deal. An industry is only published when at least 15 comparable listings exist — no figure is better than a figure built on eight businesses.
A small share of each figure comes from somewhere else: the deals people run through our free analyzer, stored anonymously. Those are real businesses being weighed by real buyers, which is why they count — and identical entries count once, so re-running the same deal cannot move the market. Only the last 90 days count.
The figures are the seller’s own. We have not verified them, and a stated SDE is a claim until someone checks it against the tax returns — which is the entire reason the rest of this product exists.
Where does your deal sit?
Enter an asking price and the earnings behind it. Get an instant Scout Score, free, no login.
Analyze a deal free →Where these numbers come from
6,452 comparable businesses in this issue, compiled October 12, 2026. Each one is a live listing we crawl or an anonymized run of our own free analyzer, counted once:
- Flippa3,454
- BizBuySell1,348
- BusinessBroker.net698
- BusinessesForSale394
- Empire Flippers249
- Quiet Light114
- Baton102
- Website Closers55
- LoopNet4
- BizQuest2
- Our free deal analyzer, anonymized — last 90 days32
Every figure is the seller’s own, as published: an asking price and a stated SDE. We have not audited either. Analyzer entries are figures a visitor typed in about a real deal they were weighing, stored without any identifying detail — they are not our estimates, and they are counted once however many times the button was pressed.