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Publications

What your agency is worth, and how to raise it.

Practical articles for real estate media agency owners on pricing, hiring, recurring revenue and selling. Each one opens on a real agency and a real number, and ends with what to do about it. Two new pieces a month.

Rows of blue houses funnelling toward a single gold one
Article11 min read

The Squeeze on the Middle

The floor came up, the ceiling came down, and you are standing in between

One owner in the group now pays 43 cents an image for daytime editing, down from 85 cents with human editors. A shop with a laptop can buy the same subscription. Meanwhile a platform held us to $10,000 a month for seven months on a contract that auto-renewed, at a point when we were already hurting. Nothing in your business broke. The position it sits in did.

  • The floor came up
  • The ceiling came down
  • And the middle pays rent
  • Working harder in the middle is not a strategy
  • + 2 more sections
  • trends
  • ai
  • growth
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Two floor plans joined into one on a blueprint
Article10 min read

Buying the Agency Across Town Without a Big Check

The math that lets consolidators buy your market works just as well in the other direction.

One owner in this group is buying the shop across town right now for $30,000 up front and $20,000 over twelve months, paid as a share of revenue from the clients that come with it. One advisor in our orbit came in on the exit of a nine-year private equity roll-up, and the whole effort returned about 9% a year. Buying the agency across town is still the cheapest growth you will find. Just do not confuse it with getting rich quickly.

  • The tired owner across town is an asset, not just a rival
  • Structures that work when you don't have the cash
  • What you're actually buying, and what you're not
  • Integration is where deals die
  • + 1 more section
  • buying
  • growth
  • deal-structure
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A cut-paper figure holding an agency's camera, drone, and house on strings
Article10 min read

The Founder-Dependence Discount

If the business needs you daily, a buyer is not purchasing a company

Somewhere in the process a buyer will ask what happens here if you are unavailable for ninety days. On $600,000 of earnings, the honest answer is worth $1.2 million, because the same agency prices at 3x or at 5x depending on how much of it runs without you in the room.

  • The dependence hides in three places
  • Why it shows up as a discount, not a discussion
  • Leadership is the constraint, not the tooling
  • What actually removes the discount
  • + 1 more section
  • growth
  • valuation
  • operations
Read
A small house at the centre of a ring of gold
Article9 min read

Recurring Revenue Changes the Math

The same fix that solves January solves your multiple

An agency doing $3M at a 20% margin earns about $600K, and that same $600K sells for anywhere between $1.8M and $3M. Same clients, same crew, $1.2M of difference, decided mostly by whether the revenue arrives on a contract or has to be resold from scratch every thirty days.

  • Project revenue is a treadmill you rebuild every month
  • Growth on project revenue can make you poorer
  • The predictability premium is a real number
  • What building it actually looks like
  • + 1 more section
  • growth
  • recurring-revenue
  • valuation
Read
Gold steps rising to a small white house
Article9 min read

What Moves the Multiple

Same earnings, different price. The gap gets built years before anyone names a number.

Two agencies both cleared $600,000 in adjusted EBITDA last year. One sold for $1.8 million. The other sold for $3 million. That $1.2 million gap was decided two or three years before either owner ever took a buyer's call.

  • What a multiple actually measures
  • Lever one: can anyone predict next year
  • Lever two: does the business need you specifically
  • Lever three: what kind of company do you appear to be
  • + 2 more sections
  • valuation
  • multiples
  • growth
Read
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What agency owners in the group are seeing on pricing, offers, platforms and AI, with the numbers attached. Unsubscribe whenever. No pitching.

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