BC Business Opportunities: Where the Listings Are and What the Market Looks Like Now

What we count and how

This site holds every business and commercial listing in BC that a REALTOR has placed on the MLS system and released to the CREA Data Distribution Facility, refreshed every night. Each business listing is classified into a category from the agent's own description, and the counts, medians and price ranges you see on category and city pages are recomputed after each sync. Nothing on this page is an estimate.

Where the inventory is

Food service dominates BC's business-for-sale inventory: restaurants, quick-service and takeout, cafés and bubble tea, pizza and bakeries together make up the largest group of listings, followed by franchises across sectors, personal services such as salons and barbershops, and accommodation in the Interior and on Vancouver Island. Metro Vancouver, Surrey and Richmond carry the most listings by city; Kelowna, Victoria and Nanaimo lead outside the Lower Mainland. The category hub and the city hub show today's numbers.

Reading the market report

The market report charts new listings against listings that left the market over the last twelve weeks, the distribution of asking prices, and the median asking price by category and by city. A rising line of off-market listings with flat new listings means inventory is being absorbed; the opposite means buyers have more choice and more room to negotiate. The methodology is on the page so you can check what each figure means.

Deal terms you can search by

Because we read every listing's description, you can search by how the deal works, not only by category: turnkey businesses, franchise resales, listings that state training is provided, owner-operator and absentee-run businesses, businesses sold with their property, and listings that mention seller financing. Each tag shows the sentence it came from.

Regional patterns worth knowing

Metro Vancouver's inventory is dominated by leased-premises businesses: restaurants, cafés, salons, franchises and retail in strip malls and food courts, where the value is the lease and the trade rather than property. The Fraser Valley adds trades, manufacturing and automotive businesses with industrial premises. The Okanagan and the Kootenays carry the province's hospitality inventory: motels, resorts, campgrounds and RV parks, often sold with the land. Vancouver Island mixes all of these with marinas, tourism operators and businesses in small communities where the listing is often the only one of its kind in town. Northern BC listings are fewer, larger, and more often include property.

For a buyer this means the diligence questions change by region: lease and landlord in the Lower Mainland, property, water and septic in the Interior and the North, seasonality on the Island and in resort towns.

Seasonality and timing of listings

Hospitality and tourism businesses tend to be listed after the season ends, when the year's results are known, and buyers who want to operate the next season need to close before spring. Retail and food service list year-round, with a lift after the fiscal year-end statements are ready. Watch the market report's new-listings line for your category and set an email alert so you see listings the day they appear rather than after other buyers have.

Timing a purchase

Nobody can time a small business market, but you can watch two things on this site: how long a listing has been active, shown on every listing page, and the new-versus-off-market trend in the market report. A listing that has been active for many months with price reductions is a negotiation; a category where new listings are scarce is where you should set up an alert.

Browse listings

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• CREA Data Distribution Facility

This guide is general information for British Columbia, not legal, tax or financial advice. Rules change; confirm current requirements with the regulator linked above and with your own lawyer and accountant before you buy.