How it works for Buyers

The Biz.for.Sale database offers you, the buyer, an opportunity to view a listing of Businesses for Sale that meet the criteria you specify in terms of price, industry, location and activity.

There are no hidden costs for the buyer and, in fact, there are no costs at all. You simply scan through the listings, send messages to those offerings that appeal to you, and wait for the seller to contact you directly.

Businesses are listed by both owner sellers and business brokers, so you could be contacted by either. Please do not contact us at Biz.for.Sale for further information on businesses listed as we are a web publishing service and are not involved in the sale process. We maintain close contact with the sellers and businesses are removed immediately if they are no longer for sale or are under sale negotiation. Listings are therefore fresh and available.

We recommend that you should read through the Frequently Asked Questions from Buyers which will explain much of how the processes work.

Should you be interested in opening a new business and are attracted to the security of a franchise operation, then you might want to visit our Franchise Opportunities sister website.

When filling in your first search, please read the tips alongside as they will assist with making your search results more relevant.

How to Select A Business

This topic does not deal with the traditional advice regarding the marketplace procedures of actually acquiring a business and closing a sale. That subject is covered under the separate guide, How to Buy a Business. This current page is a quick primer on how best to use our search systems.

The biggest mistake is where a buyer places a whole range of restrictive conditions which, together, result on no suitable businesses being found. That is both frustrating and demotivating. So we advocate a search process that gives you the widest results at first, which you can then narrow down if there are too many to consider. This can be narrowed should you receive too many listings - but more often than not you will get the best results with this method. And the multi-filter advanced search should be avoided for this reason.

You need first to decide on your most important criteria and then start your first search on just that one variable.

We offer searches on :
    •   Location (Province or City)
    •   Price
    •   Keyword
    •   Profit (as Income)
    •   Reduced Price
    •   Profitability (Return on Invetment)
    •   Category (Industry)
    •   Freshness (Most Recently Listed)
    •   Legal Structure (Pty Ltd / cc / Sole Prop etc)

So if you live in Johannesburg, are definitely not planning to move and will be a hands-on involved owner, then you should start with a Metro City Proximity search on Johannesburg which will return all businesses which should enable a daily commute for a Johannesburg resident. This has the benefit of turning up one or two others that you may not have initially considered.

But maybe you are passionate about wanting to buy a Beauty Salon, you are qualified in this field, and you want to move to somewhere with a better lifestyle, then you would search on the keyword [Beauty], and afterwards try [Salon} as well.

From the list above, decide on your main two or three criteria and then proceed to the Search Page where you can run some quick scans and assess the results.