Selling Your Veterinary Practice
Your practice isn’t just any business – it’s your veterinary practice and you’ve invested a fortune and many years of your life into your practice. Your veterinary practice is a living monument to your life’s work up to this point. Your veterinary practice is your personal accumulation of sweat, equity and lifetime achievement and it’s important that when you are ready to sell your practice you get the best possible exposure available. That’s where VeterinaryPracticesForSale.com comes in! We can help you promote your practice by exposing over a thousand veterinarians to your listing each month.
Selling your veterinary practice is likely the biggest single transaction you will ever make in your professional career. So getting the most from that one transaction is not just important, it is essential to your future security and plans. Over the next 10-20 years, an unprecedented number of veterinary practices will be available for sale as the “baby boomers” reach retirement age, and if you’re like most veterinarians, you are counting on the proceeds of the sale of your veterinary practice to finance a major portion of your retirement income.
But, as with any professional business, your veterinary practice can only be sold once and then only to an extremely limited number of candidates – other veterinarians who want to buy a practice like yours. This has made the marketplace the most difficult in history when it comes to finding the right buyer for a veterinary practice. The market is basically becoming a buyer’s market making it challenging for those who wish sell their life’s investment – their one and only practice.
The bottom line is that only the most attractive veterinary practices will sell in the future. And there are many practices that will not be able to be sold at all as they are brought into this challenging and emerging marketplace.
Selling a veterinary practice can be a challenging feat because the valuation process of professional practices has developed into a professional discipline in its own right. The goal of a veterinary practice appraisal, or valuation, is usually to determine the fair market dollar value of the veterinary practice. The formal definition of fair market value, as defined and established by the American Society of Appraisers, is “the amount at which property would change hands between a willing seller and willing buyer when neither is acting under duress, and when both have reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts.” With this being said, any compelling issue such as a death, burnout, or disability by the seller will change the playing field between buyer and seller and could ultimately result in a so called “fire sale” ultimately bringing a much lower price for the seller and a unique buying opportunity for the buyer.
Many times when a buyer cannot procure 100% financing from a lender, but can get for example say 80% funding for a practice purchase you as the seller must be willing and able to carry in essence a second mortgage on the practice to get the deal done or discount the practice in order to seal the deal. This percentage of the purchase price you as the seller may carry varies but it is not uncommon for the buyer and seller to come to some agreement regarding this number and for this to be part of a purchase deal. The good news for you as the seller it that carried note allows the deal to be completed quickly, but the down side is you are still tied to your old business through the seller for some period of time.
Whether you’re a practice broker, you’re advertising your practice for sale yourself or you’re using a veterinary practice broker – to ensure your ideal potential buyer finds you and your practice make sure your practice is listed at www.VeterinaryPracticesForSale.com – The #1 Place online for Buying and Selling a Veterinary Practice.
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