Mr. Handelsman

Finance & Investment

Successfully Selling Your Hotel/Motel : Five Ways to Optimize your Online Listing

By Mike Handelsman, Group General Manager, BizBuySell.com

Each year, many hotel owners decide to sell their business for a variety of personal and financial reasons. Whatever the cause, selling successfully requires the owner to think creatively and strategically to attract the maximum number of potential buyers and weed out those who aren’t serious about buying. As the Internet has emerged as one of the most efficient and effective vehicles to publicize your business sale and attract potential buyers, part of this strategy should include an online listing. A well thought-out and well-written listing will allow a seller to attract more prospects and better sort the serious buyers from the rest.

By keeping the following rules of online listings in mind, you can help ensure that your business attracts the greatest number of potential buyers, and that the selling process goes quickly and smoothly.

1. Provide Financial and Geographic Details

Perhaps the most important aspect of filling out your listing is properly balancing the amount of details you provide while still retaining confidentiality. Through our experience with BizBuySell.com and BizQuest.com, two of the largest business-for-sale marketplaces in the U.S., we’ve found there are many ways to successfully achieve this. We’ll get to the confidentiality aspect in a minute but first, let’s take a look at what details you need to provide.

The most essential aspect of your listing will be the hotel’s financial situation. Including your finances, such as revenue and cash flow, can greatly increase the number of views for your business listing, as this is the most common way potential buyers search for businesses. Disclosing the financial information of your hotel in a listing is likely to build confidence in potential buyers. If you do not include the information, buyers might get the impression that you have something to hide and quickly navigate away from your listing.

Sellers should also provide as much geographic information as they can without revealing the exact identity of the hotel. Most buyers search at the county or city/town level, and by hiding the city/town of your business in your listing, you eliminate your listing from their search results. Many sellers are hesitant to provide details on their hotel’s location, but disclosing this information will almost always result in more messages from potential buyers.

2. Retain Confidentiality

The reason many hotel owners may be cautious about providing too many details is to keep the sale a secret. This is a valid concern. In order to keep the hotel running smoothly during the selling process, you will probably want to be extremely careful not to let customers, employees and competitors know you are selling. This means that while providing some details are important, other details should be kept at a minimum. The key is to provide the most information possible without giving away the identity of the business (assuming you want to keep the potential sale confidential).

Finding images to include in your business for sale listing that do not disclose too much information is just one example of working around confidentiality. The idea also applies to the text that you include in the listing. You can almost always disclose the state and county of your business without disclosing the actual identity of the business. It is a good idea to avoid including your hotel’s actual address. Instead, be non-specific and communicate benefits with information such as “near major highway,” “one of this town’s busiest streets,” or “one of the leading hotels in the area.” Providing a more general description of your property and its location allows you to expose the identifying information only after you have qualified and interacted with potential buyers.

3. Be Creative to Stand Out

Creativity is an important part of separating yourself from other hotels on the market. And it all starts with your headline. While the details in your listing will get potential buyers to click the “reply” button, your headline is what gets them to click on the listing in the first place.

Before listing, put yourself in a buyer’s frame of mind. It will help to draft a list of the qualities of your hotel that would most make you want to buy. If you bought the hotel from someone else, remember what features first made you interested. Was it an ideal location, a year-round property, or a great-looking building? Decide what is best about the hotel you are selling, and prominently feature those details in a headline that effectively conveys what is special about it.

You can also get creative with the way you post your listing to gain more interest. You will probably have the option of listing the business under two categories – a “best matching business type” and a “next best matching business type.” Even though a business might at first seem as though it would only fit within one category, it is best to use both categories to maximize exposure. In fact, passing up the opportunity to list your business under a second category is almost like passing up a free second listing.

For example, while a category such as “Hotels and Other Lodging Places” would most likely be your first choice, choosing categories such as “Other Business Services” or “Miscellaneous Services” can only help you by ensuring that more prospective buyers view your listing.

4. Include Pictures

One of the most effective ways to differentiate your business for sale listing from the rest is to include photos. While you should probably not include a picture of the outside or any obvious interior section of your business to maintain confidentiality, there are other ways to mix images into the text.

For example, taking a photo of one of the rooms of your hotel – making sure to capture its best features – can give potential buyers a good look at what you have to offer without sacrificing too much confidentiality. If your hotel is near a beach, or a popular destination, include those photos to enhance the appeal of your listing and increase your chances of engaging a potential buyer.

Free online image databases such as Google Images can serve as a useful source of imagery that can help make your listing stand out from the crowd. However, be careful not to select images of any part of any specific business that is not yours.

5. Include the Right Contact Information and Respond Quickly

This may sound obvious but it is crucial to include a phone number in your business listing to reassure potential buyers and maximize contacts. To maintain confidentiality, though, it is not a good idea to provide the phone number of the hotel you are selling. Instead, provide a personal or alternate phone number people can call to inquire about the listing.

Although it can help to provide a variety of ways in which a buyer can contact you if interested, you should generally avoid including your personal e-mail address to protect against spam and protect confidentiality. It is a good idea to create a new e-mail address specifically for responses from your listing. If you do so, make sure you check the account daily to avoid missing any responses.

Whichever forms of contact you choose to include in your listing, be sure you have a strong follow-up process. Respond to questions about your listing right away, and if prospective buyers seem serious, don’t keep them waiting too long for information or they will likely become discouraged and look elsewhere.

The way you list your hotel online is just as essential as the many other aspects of selling. Take your time and be sure to provide all the information you would want if you were the buyer. And as a final tip, don’t forget to proofread your online listing. Small errors can instantly detract valuable buyers who are looking for a seller who appears buttoned-up in every way. If your listing appears well thought-out, you’ll be sure to attract the most readers, the most interested buyers and consequently, the highest offers.

Mike Handelsman is Group General Manager for BizBuySell.com and BizQuest.com, the Internet's two largest and most heavily trafficked business-for-sale marketplaces. Both sites feature business valuation tools that draw from the largest databases of sales comparables for recently sold small businesses and include two of the industry's leading franchise directories. Since 1995, BizBuySell and BizQuest have offered tools that make it easy for business owners and brokers to sell a business and for potential buyers to find the perfect business. Together, BizBuySell and BizQuest list more than 75,000 businesses for sale at any time and have over 850,000 monthly visits. Mr. Handelsman can be contacted at 415-284-4390 or mhandelsman@BizBuySell.com Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.