BusinessesForSale.com Listings — Price, Financials & Broker

BusinessesForSale.com Listings — Price, Financials & Broker

Search businessesforsale.com by free-text keyword and return business-for-sale marketplace listings: asking price, sales revenue, cash flow, full description, and the listing broker's name/contact link. Public marketplace data — no login wall, no account required to browse.

Typical use: lead generation for business brokers, M&A advisors, and franchise/roll-up buyers sourcing acquisition targets by industry keyword; or market-sizing (how many "restaurant" / "laundromat" / "HVAC" businesses are currently listed for sale, at what asking-price range).

Input

Output fields

One record per matched listing. Fields marked "detail" only populate when fetchDetails is true (default) and that listing's detail-page fetch succeeds.

parse_confidence is high when the core search fields (title + at least one of asking price/revenue/cash flow) are present and the detail fetch enriched the record with a full description or a broker name; medium when core fields are present but detail enrichment is missing/thin (owner-direct listing with no broker, or fetchDetails: false); low if even the search-row fields are missing.

Live-verified field fill-rate (cloud gate run, keyword "restaurant", 8 records)

Checked against the champion comparable's declared field set (askingPrice / broker / title / location / salesRevenue / cashFlow / description):

broker_name/broker_url sit at 63% because 3 of the 8 sampled listings are genuinely owner-direct (no broker on file at all on the source page) — the marketplace's own disclosure state, not a parser miss. The remaining detail-only fields (employees/years_established/financing_available/ support_training) are optional key-facts the seller may or may not have filled in on the original listing; low fill-rate there reflects source coverage, not extraction failure.

Bug found and fixed during build (2026-07-20): the first cloud gate run showed broker_name populating on 5/8 records but broker_url at 0/8, even though the URL was present in the raw HTML for all 5 — a stricter regex required the agent-listing link to sit immediately after the broker name, but production pages sometimes insert a

<span class="broker-span">Broker license number: ...</span>

Charge event

This actor bills per listing record delivered:

• listing-record — charged once per record pushed to the dataset (whether or not the detail-page enrichment succeeded — the core asking-price/revenue/cash-flow/description fields are the JTBD-critical payload on every record).

PII disclosure

No PII. This actor returns business-for-sale marketplace listings — asking price, financials, and a business broker/agency's public contact (name + link to their public listing roster on the marketplace). It does not return any individual person's name, address, phone, or email. Owner-direct listings (no broker) carry no broker fields at all, and the marketplace itself does not expose the seller's identity on the public listing page.

Notes

• Detail-page fetches hit an intermittent Cloudflare managed challenge (live-probed rate: roughly 1 in 6 fresh proxy sessions during dev testing — an IP-reputation check, not a per-URL hard block). The actor treats this as retryable: on a block it rotates to a brand-new Apify RESIDENTIAL proxy session (never reusing the same session twice) and retries up to 2 extra times before giving up and shipping the record with search-row fields only (detail_fetched: false). This kept the fleet inside the $0-COGS curl_cffi + Apify-proxy transport tier — no browser/managed-access escalation was needed.
• Financial fields (asking_price/sales_revenue/cash_flow) are kept as raw display strings rather than parsed to numbers: real listings routinely show non-numeric disclosure states ("Undisclosed", "On request", "Not applicable") or ranges ("$100K - $250K") instead of a fixed figure — parsing to a number would lose information or fail on these legitimate cases.

Usage statistics

This Actor creates a small, content-free summary at the end of each run. It is used only to monitor reliability and improve this Actor. A copy is saved as USAGE_STATS in your own Apify key-value store, so you can see the exact record created for your run.

Set disableUsageStats to true in the input to opt out. Nothing is sent then; your USAGE_STATS record only says that statistics were disabled.

Only these fields are recorded:

• schema version, Actor name and build number;
• UTC start and finish hour (not a precise timestamp);
• run duration, number of results and time to the first result, each as a coarse range;
• whether the result was empty, the end status, and an error type from a fixed list;
• memory setting and counts of charged events;
• names of the input fields you set, never their values;
• the selected option for input fields that offer a fixed list of choices (for example a sort order).

We do not collect input text, search terms, URLs, domains, usernames, email addresses, names, proxy credentials, tokens, scraped records, output items, raw error messages, stack traces, or hashes of any of those values. Records are kept for no longer than 13 months, used only as aggregated operational statistics, and never sold or shared.

Additional fields (Phase 2)

This Actor also records your Apify user ID, whether Apify marks the account as paying, the size range of list inputs, the selected country when the input offers a fixed list of countries, and one category from a fixed Actor taxonomy. We use these fields only for aggregate reliability, repeat-use and cross-Actor analysis; reports suppress any cell with fewer than five distinct users.

The same disableUsageStats: true input flag turns these fields off too. The user ID is removed after 13 months; we do not export, sell, share, or attempt to re-identify this data.

Run-outcome signals (v2)

To learn whether a run did what it was asked to do, the record also holds a few more coarse ranges and yes/no flags. None of them contains content:

• the result limit you asked for (a range, when the input has one) and what share of it was delivered;
• results delivered per input item you listed (a range);
• output quality as ranges: how fully the result fields were filled, the share of rows that look like errors, the share of duplicate rows, and how many different fields appeared. These are counted in memory while results are saved; no result content is kept;
• how the run was started (console, API, schedule, webhook, another Actor);
• how it ended: stopped by you, timed out, reached the requested limit, stopped by the charge limit, and how many times the platform moved the run;
• if this Actor reports it: how many items to process worked or failed (ranges) and one failure reason from a fixed list;
• a short code made from the names of the input fields you set, never their values.

Repeat-run fingerprint (v2)

When your Apify user ID is recorded (see above), the record also holds an 8-character one-way code made from your input (proxy settings left out) and this Actor's name. It only lets us see that the same account ran the same input again soon after an unsatisfying run; we never see the input itself. It is stored only in the database, never published, and reports use it in aggregate with the same five-user minimum. It is the one exception to the statement above that no hashes are collected, and disableUsageStats: true turns it off.