Valuation guide
Asking price vs sold price
An asking price is what a seller hoped for. A sold price is what a buyer actually paid. Both appear on marketplace pages, often in the same typeface — and only one of them is evidence of value.
ExitComps tracks sold outcomes only. Every figure above is read live from our public
/api/stats endpoint at page load; nothing on this page is a placeholder number.
Why the gap exists
A listing's ask is set by the seller, usually with a broker's encouragement, and it stays visible for as long as the listing does. The closing price is agreed privately at the end, and on most platforms it is never published at all. So the internet is full of asks and nearly empty of sales — and the asks are the numbers that get quoted as "what these businesses go for".
The direction of the error is consistent: asks are the ceiling of a negotiation, not its midpoint. Pricing your own exit against other people's asks means pricing against a number no one has agreed to pay.
Four ways an ask gets presented as a sale
These are not hypotheticals. Each one is a pattern our collection routine hit on a real source, recorded in our public source register, and each is the reason a source is partly or wholly excluded from our data.
On Flippa, listings sold as classifieds (rather than at auction) still head their
price block Asking Price (Classified) — on a page that also says
Sold on Flippa. Two claims, one number, and the label is the one that tells
the truth. Checked again on a live sold classified 2026-08-22: unchanged. We exclude
every Flippa classified for this reason and ingest only reserve-met auctions, whose
pages state Highest Bid (Reserve Met) USD $….
On Microns, a "recently sold" card on the homepage labels its figure Exit Price.
Open the listing the card links to and the identical figure is labelled
Asking Price, beside an Already Sold marker (checked 2026-08-21).
A number that changes its name depending on which page you land on is not a sale price.
We take Microns deals only from the surfaces that state a sale outright — its newsletter
posts and its success stories.
Empire Flippers publishes a sold-listings API with thousands of records. Its money field
is listing_price, which Empire Flippers' own documentation defines as the
asking price; there is no sale-price field for a sold record (checked 2026-08-21).
Empire Flippers' own scoreboard carried an "average % of list price sold for" statistic
when we read it on 2026-08-20 — an admission, in their own numbers, that list and sold
are different quantities. Anyone bulk-loading that feed as "sold prices" is publishing
asks. We record it as a dead source for comps rather than ingest one row from it.
In announced deals, a headline total often folds in an earn-out: "$18.95 million" that resolves in the article's own prose to cash at closing, a deferred slice, and an earn-out of up to the remainder, contingent on targets years away. The headline is the maximum the seller could ever receive, not the consideration. Deferred but fixed totals are real prices; contingent maxima are not, and we skip them.
How to check the number in front of you
- Read the label, not the layout. "Asking", "list", "buy it now" and "starting bid" are all pre-sale figures however prominently they are set.
- Find the sold marker on the same page as the price. A sold badge in one place and a price in another are two facts that may not belong together.
- For auctions, confirm the reserve was met. Otherwise the figure is the highest bid, which the seller refused.
- Check the currency is stated where the price is stated. A converted figure is someone's arithmetic, not the source's claim.
- Read past the headline total for earn-out language. "Up to", "based on performance" and "milestone" turn a price into a cap.
- Look for a date. A price with no date cannot be compared to anything.
Every row in the ExitComps database carries the source link that states its number, so you can run these checks against our data too. That is deliberate: a comp you cannot audit is a rumour with a decimal point. See the methodology for grading rules.
Pricing against sales instead
If you are buying, the ask is the opening of a conversation and comparable sales are your evidence in it. If you are selling, comparable sales are what a diligent buyer will eventually price you against, so it is cheaper to know them first.
Related: what a profit multiple actually means · all valuation guides