The first time someone asked me to come in to talk to them about listing their property for sale, I was pretty unsure about how to handle the meeting.
Of course, I had my own ideas about the value of the property. But I was also concerned about the possibility of losing the assignment by being too conservative about the proposed listing price. After all, there a lot of brokers, some of them very successful, who “buy” listings by telling sellers what they want to hear, instead of what reality is.
In the end, I decided to fall back on my training as an i-banker. In that job, a few times a month, we’d be invited in to pitch for the sale of $20-250MM media / technology companies. Of course, the most important question from the potential client would be: “What’s my company worth?”.
This was a difficult question to answer, because companies are so different from each other.
The best approach was to use a combination of methods. We would do a discounted cashflow valuation of the company’s free cashflow. We would do an analysis of comparable sale transactions to get at a reasonable multiple of revenue and earnings (usually EBITDA, for the accounting nerds out there… which is an insane profit measure to use, but that’s another rant). Then, we would look at how the public markets valued similar, publicly traded companies (again, extracting revenue and EBITDA multiples).
Individually, these methods were unreliable. But, if you did the work and then put the value estimates together and took a range, you could get a pretty accurate sense for the market value of the company in an auction situation.
It turns out this is a very good way to think about valuing apartment buildings, too. So, in the next day or two, I will set out the way we here at Adaptive go about valuing apartment buildings here in Los Angeles for the purposes of selling them.