BizBuySell Scraper — Businesses for Sale, Cash Flow & Broker Leads

Extract business-for-sale listings from BizBuySell.com — the largest online marketplace for buying and selling small businesses in the US — with asking price, cash flow/SDE, gross revenue, EBITDA, location, category and broker contact data, ready for acquisition research, deal sourcing and lead generation. No browser, no login, no manual tokens.

Main Use Cases

• Business acquisition research — build your pipeline of businesses for sale across states, cities and industries.
• Business broker lead generation — collect broker name, phone and company from public listings.
• Small business valuation benchmarking — compare asking price, cash flow and EBITDA across regions and niches.
• Franchise opportunity tracking — filter franchise listings by type, price and location.
• Business-for-sale market intelligence — monitor newly listed, price-reduced and recently updated businesses.
• Sell-side and buy-side deal sourcing — export structured listing data to your CRM or deal flow tool.

How It Works

The Actor runs a light, HTTP-only pipeline — no browser is ever launched. A Chrome-fingerprint HTTP client reads the same listing data the public site serves to normal visitors, through your proxy (plain DATACENTER by default — verified working and cheapest), handling the site's automated protections on its own. Search results come from the site's listing feed; when the edge blocks it, the server-rendered SEO pages are parsed instead, purely over HTTP.

One honest caveat: BizBuySell's edge serves an interactive challenge to plain HTTP on IP lines it does not pre-trust. The Actor rotates a small pool of proxies (max 5) and stops early if all are challenged. If a run returns 0 listings, switch the proxy group or set apifyProxyCountry to GB or CA — or simply re-run later. Test runs complete in about 10 seconds with full results.

Find Businesses for Sale for Acquisition Research

Start from any BizBuySell search page — a state feed, a category feed, or the nationwide feed — and let the Actor paginate it automatically:

• https://www.bizbuysell.com/california-businesses-for-sale/
• https://www.bizbuysell.com/restaurants-and-food-businesses-for-sale/
• https://www.bizbuysell.com/businesses-for-sale/ (nationwide)

Detail pages (.../business-opportunity/...) are also supported.

Build Business Broker Lead Lists from Public Data

Every listing carries the listing broker's name, phone and company. Combined with location, category and asking price, this turns a public listing feed into a ready-made broker outreach list for M&A advisors, business brokers and acquisition hunters.

Compare Asking Price, Cash Flow and EBITDA

Listings expose the financials business buyers care about — askingPrice, cashFlow (SDE), grossRevenue and ebitda (when disclosed) — so you can benchmark multiples by industry, region and asking-price band without clicking through hundreds of pages.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
startUrls	array	no	[]	Search, category or listing URLs. Paginated automatically. Empty = nationwide feed. Category URLs are scraped without the category filter unless filters.industryId is set.
filters.keyword	string	no	—	Free-text keyword, e.g. "laundromat".
filters.askingPriceMin / askingPriceMax	integer	no	—	Minimum/maximum asking price in USD.
filters.cashFlowMin / cashFlowMax	integer	no	—	Minimum/maximum cash flow in USD.
filters.grossIncomeMin / grossIncomeMax	integer	no	—	Minimum/maximum gross revenue in USD.
filters.listingTypeIds	array	no	[30, 40, 80]	BizBuySell defaults: 30 = Businesses for sale, 40 = Franchises, 80 = Business opportunities.
filters.daysListedAgo	integer	no	0	0 = any time; e.g. 30 = only listings from the last 30 days.
filters.establishedAfterYear	integer	no	0	Only businesses established after this year (e.g. 2010).
filters.industryId	integer	no	—	Experimental: single BizBuySell industry-hierarchy id (e.g. 2600 Airports/FBO, 2606 Bar). Mapping is not documented and may be ignored by the site.
filters.location	string	no	—	Overrides location for every search URL. Accepts state ("California", "CA" or "california"), "City, ST", or a US state name.
filters.customLocation	string	no	—	Raw JSON of the BizBuySell location object, e.g. captured from the browser's _sl cookie or DevTools network payload. Overrides filters.location.
filters.absenteeOwnerListings	boolean	no	—	Owner does not work in the business.
filters.listingsWithPriceReduced	boolean	no	—	Listings with a reduced price.
filters.listingsRecentlyUpdated	boolean	no	—	Listings updated recently.
filters.listingsWithNoAskingPrice	boolean	no	—	Include listings that don't show an asking price.
filters.homeBasedListings	boolean	no	—	Only home-based businesses.
filters.includeRealEstateForLease	boolean	no	—	Include real-estate-for-lease listings.
filters.listingsWithSellerFinancing	boolean	no	—	Only listings offering seller financing.
filters.realEstateIncluded	boolean	no	—	Only listings where real estate is included in the sale.
filters.showRelocatableListings	boolean	no	—	Include relocatable businesses.
maxItems	integer	no	100	Max listings across all start URLs. Free users are capped at 10.
maxPagesPerUrl	integer	no	20	Safety cap on pagination depth per start URL.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": true}	DATACENTER by default (cheapest). RESIDENTIAL or Default group also work.

Output

One dataset item per business listing:

Field	Description
listNumber	BizBuySell's listing ID (stable dedup key).
title / description	Listing headline and summary.
askingPrice	Asking price in USD, when disclosed.
cashFlow	Annual cash flow / SDE in USD, when disclosed.
grossRevenue	Annual gross revenue in USD, when disclosed.
ebitda	EBITDA in USD, when disclosed.
location	City + state.
category	Business category.
brokerName / brokerPhone / brokerCompany	Listing broker contact details.
establishedYear / employees	Populated when the detail page is served (detail fetching is off by default).
url	Direct link to the listing detail page.

Download results as JSON, HTML, CSV or Excel from the Apify dataset.

Example Input

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.bizbuysell.com/california-businesses-for-sale/"],
  "filters": {
    "keyword": "laundromat",
    "askingPriceMax": 500000,
    "cashFlowMin": 50000,
    "listingsWithPriceReduced": true
  },
  "maxItems": 100,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Example Output

{
  "listNumber": 2538659,
  "title": "Own a Popular Turnkey TexMex Fast Casual National Franchise Restaurant",
  "description": "Established TexMex Fast Casual Franchise Restaurant - Totowa, NJ ...",
  "askingPrice": 165000,
  "cashFlow": 59000,
  "grossRevenue": 1280000,
  "ebitda": 180000,
  "location": "Totowa, NJ",
  "category": "Restaurants & Food",
  "brokerName": "John Smith",
  "brokerPhone": "(555) 123-4567",
  "brokerCompany": "Smith Business Advisors",
  "url": "https://www.bizbuysell.com/business-opportunity/own-a-popular-turnkey-texmex-fast-casual-national-franchise-restaurant/2538659/"
}

Automate Business Listing Monitoring

• Schedule daily or weekly runs on the Apify platform to track newly listed businesses, price reductions and market movements.
• Paged API access — the Apify API returns fresh JSON and your downstream tools never touch the site.
• Integrations — wire results into Zapier, Make, Sheets or your CRM via webhooks and the Apify API.

Related Actors

• abotapi/bizbuysell-scraper — the other widely used BizBuySell actor (validated against this one for coverage).
• parseforge/bizbuysell-scraper-v2 — another popular option for the same marketplace.
• ahmed_jasarevic/hotfrog-scraper — business directory data for lead enrichment alongside buying-side listings.

FAQ

Why use this actor instead of the official BizBuySell API?

BizBuySell does not offer a public API for its listing data — the only third-party access is through scrapers. This Actor provides the same structured data through a clean, documented interface with none of the site's click-through friction, and at one of the lowest per-result prices on the Store.

What are alternatives to BizBuySell data?

• Other Apify actors: abotapi/bizbuysell-scraper, parseforge/bizbuysell-scraper-v2.
• Other business-for-sale marketplaces you can scrape: LoopNet (business/real estate), BusinessesForSale.com, Craigslists's business section (regional), and state business-broker association listings.

How can I scrape businesses for sale in a specific state?

Set startUrls to the state feed (e.g. https://www.bizbuysell.com/florida-businesses-for-sale/) or use filters.location (e.g. "Texas" or "Austin, TX") to override location across any URL set.

Is scraping BizBuySell legal?

Scraping public listing data must respect BizBuySell's Terms of Service. This Actor makes a modest number of requests per run (it is not an aggressive crawler) — review the ToS before commercial use and consider per-run rate limits.

Why did my run return 0 listings?

The site fingerprints the exit IP and occasionally serves its interactive challenge to plain HTTP on that line. Re-run later, or switch the proxy group to RESIDENTIAL, or set apifyProxyCountry to GB/CA (only the egress line changes — the US listings returned do not).

For AI Agents & LLM Apps

The BizBuySell Scraper is callable via the Apify MCP server (ahmed_jasarevic/bizbuysell-scraper) and the Apify REST API.

Purpose: given a BizBuySell search/category/state URL (or a keyword/location filter), returns structured business-for-sale listings with financials (asking price, cash flow, gross revenue, EBITDA) and broker contact details.

Minimal working input:

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.bizbuysell.com/businesses-for-sale/"],
  "maxItems": 10
}

Variant input (filtered search):

{
  "startUrls": [],
  "filters": { "keyword": "laundromat", "location": "Florida", "cashFlowMin": 60000 },
  "maxItems": 25
}

Note: startUrls: [] (or omitted) uses the nationwide feed.

Output fields: listNumber, title, description, askingPrice, cashFlow, grossRevenue, ebitda, location, category, brokerName, brokerPhone, brokerCompany, establishedYear, employees, url.

Behaviors an agent should know:

• maxItems caps total listings across all URLs; free accounts are capped at 10, so budget result costs accordingly on paid plans.
• filters values override any filter encoded in a startUrl when both are set.
• A 0-listing result usually means the site challenged the egress IP — retry later or switch proxy group/country rather than assuming the query matched nothing.
• establishedYear/employees are only populated when the site serves the detail page over HTTP (detail-page fetching is off by default).
• Category URLs (e.g. restaurants) are scraped without a category filter unless filters.industryId is set — apply an industry id for category-targeted runs.

Billing: pay-per-result — cheap ($0.0012/new result, $0.0005/start, DATACENTER proxies default, 512 MB memory).

Legal & Compliance Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by BizBuySell.com or its operators.

It only accesses publicly available listing pages the same way a normal visitor would (no login bypass, no CAPTCHA solving). Users are responsible for their own compliance with BizBuySell's Terms of Service and applicable law; review the ToS before commercial use and respect per-run rate limits.

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