Dreams Are Free - But the Market Doesn’t Pay for Them

As we built DealMatch, an aggregator of brokered lower middle market deals with data from 50,000+ US listings, one pattern became clear: seller aspirations rarely hold when they are being unreasonable. Take this recent example: - A seller listed their auto body shop at a 4.0x SDE multiple in March (well above the industry comps of the very tight 2-3x range). - By April, the listing was still available, and the seller had dropped their pricing to 1.9x (notably, their reported SDE also fell!) Here's the data: Month March April Asking $6.3m --> $4.0m Revenue $4.3m --> $3.7m SDE $1.04m --> $0.93m Multiple 4.0x --> 1.9x Real estate $ 2.2m (unchanged) This is one of many datapoints in the DealMatch dataset showing how quickly seller expectations adjust. Data available at www.getdealmatch.com DM me for access or deeper cuts by industry