Mapping the US Business Broker Market

Early in my search, I got stuck on a boring problem: which brokers do I actually call?

There are thousands of them. Most of us start with the 3 or 4 franchise names we've heard on podcasts, make a few calls, and wonder why the pipeline feels thin. The bigger the search gets, the more obvious it becomes that a franchise directory is not a market map.

So I built the map.

Searcher OS has been scraping hundreds of US broker sites daily for about 18 months. I pulled the last 90 days into a clean dataset (US only, excluding internal test listings) and turned it into a free broker finder for the community:

searcheros.ai/business-brokers

Filter by state, industry, and price band. It shows you which firms are actually listing in your buy box, ranked by recent volume. No login, no signup, no trial gate.

What follows are the numbers that fell out of the data. A few of them surprised me.

The Shape of the Market

Trailing 90 days:

• 42,878 attributable listings across 2,473 US broker firms
• Roughly $55B in total asking price
• 769 new listings per day
• Median asking price: $396k
• 75% of listings ask under $1M
• 95% fall under the $5M SBA 7(a) ceiling

If you're hunting in the sub-$1M SDE range, you're shopping the same pond as the vast majority of the US market. If your buy box starts at $3M, you're already fishing in the top 5%.

17 Firms Carry Half the Inventory

The Pareto curve runs steeper than most people assume.

Cumulative share of listings by firm rank:

17 firms list half of all US small-business inventory. 254 firms cover 80%. The #1 firm (Flippa) alone holds 15.6% share, though much of that is online businesses and micro-sites, a different universe from Main Street deals.

Meanwhile, 796 firms (about a third of the whole directory) list exactly one deal per quarter. Another 947 firms list 2 to 5. 70% of US broker firms run 10 or fewer deals in any 90-day window.

The practical takeaway: most brokers are not busy. The industry markets itself as a high-velocity pipeline, but the median broker is a two-person shop with three deals in flight. Getting real attention from them is easier than most searchers expect.

Four Firms Cover the Whole Country

Exactly 4 firms operate in all 50 states:

1. Sunbelt Business Advisors
2. Murphy Business
3. Transworld Business Advisors
4. First Choice Business Brokers

Those 4 alone carry 24% of the US sellside pipeline. On the other end, 66% of broker firms are single-state specialists, averaging about 5 deals per 90-day window.

If you want geographic flexibility, there are 4 nationwide relationships worth building. For everything else, the market is local. That reality changes how you prioritize who gets on your weekly call list.

Your State Decides What Kind of Market You're Shopping

State-level concentration varies more than I expected. Using HHI (the DOJ's concentration index, where 1,500+ is considered moderately concentrated):

Most concentrated (a few firms dominate the state):

• Indiana: HHI 1,991 (660 listings)
• Maryland: HHI 1,853 (611 listings)
• Florida: HHI 1,026 (5,730 listings across 499 firms, so a huge top end despite a long tail)
• Virginia: HHI 925
• Minnesota: HHI 655

Most fragmented (inventory spread across hundreds of small firms):

• North Carolina: HHI 333 (230 firms)
• Texas: HHI 348 (466 firms)
• Arizona: HHI 376 (154 firms)
• Georgia: HHI 381 (196 firms)
• Michigan: HHI 413 (171 firms)

If you're searching in Indiana, the playbook is “build relationships with the 2 or 3 firms that matter.” In Texas, the playbook is “systematic outreach across 400+ firms, because no single broker is close to the action.” Same job title, radically different market structure.

Where the Inventory Actually Is

Four states carry 40.9% of the entire US listing market:

• Florida: 15.2%
• California: 11.4%
• Texas: 7.4%
• New York: 6.9%

Florida alone is 15% of US broker inventory. Snowbird-exit deals are doing real work.

The Industry Price Gap

Median asking prices by industry span a 40x range:

The “small business” label covers a lot of ground. Buying a manufacturing operation is a different universe from buying a laundromat. Your thesis matters more than your raw deal count.

Food & Beverage plus Retail combined account for 36% of all listings. Front-of-house businesses dominate the Main Street pipeline. If your buy box explicitly rules them out, you've knocked out a third of the market before any other filter kicks in.

A Few Caveats

• The data is a 90-day snapshot and drifts week over week. The top 10 is stable; the bottom half of the top 250 churns.
• Industry tags are AI-classified. Accuracy is high but not audited.
• Asking prices, not closing prices. Real market-clearing in this segment is typically 10 to 30% below ask.
• Some franchise firms (Transworld, We Sell Restaurants) appear as both a direct scraper source and an aggregator-surfaced firm. The finder fuzzy-merges them in the UI.

What to Do With Any of This

If you're searching:

1. Know which structure your state has. Concentrated vs fragmented calls for different playbooks.
2. If you need national reach, there are 4 firms worth building relationships with.
3. Most brokers are not busy. If you've been struggling to get callbacks, the problem is probably your opening message, not their calendar.
4. The long tail of 796 one-deal-per-quarter firms is where most of the “off-market feeling” deals live. They won't show up on any franchise directory.

The finder is free and will stay that way. It's the map I wished I had in my first month of searching, built out of the same frustration that became Searcher OS.

If you try it and find something missing, I'd love to know. Wrong firms in your state? A filter you wish it had? A cut of the data that would be useful? My contact info is on the homepage.