DealSignals · Blog

How to find a business for sale before it hits a broker

By the time a good business is on a broker's site, you're one of dozens of buyers, the price reflects a bidding war, and the seller has already decided to sell to the highest number. The real edge is reaching the seller before that — while there's no competition and no listing.

The most reliable place those situations surface first is the Government Gazette. Every liquidation and business-rescue filing is published there with a company registration number and court case number — a business, a client book and a plant that a liquidator now has to sell. That is genuinely off-market: there is no listing, and most buyers never read it. Alongside it sit the quiet motivated sellers on the broker sites — emigration sales, retirements, priced-to-sell owners — buried among hundreds of ordinary listings.

Reading the Gazette by hand every week, then cross-checking the broker sites, takes hours. DealSignals does both: it scores every liquidation the day it's filed and ranks every SA business quietly for sale on one deal-heat scale, so the motivated sellers rise to the top with the first move already spelled out.

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