28% more deals and the queue is getting longer
New Zealand’s market for buying and selling small businesses just posted its strongest year on record. ABC Business Sales completed more than 500 transactions in the past year, a 28% increase on the prior period. Behind those deals sits a wall of unmet demand: 27,800 potential buyers expressed interest in businesses advertised for sale, and the ratio of signed confidentiality agreements per listing has surged to 39, up from 15 just three years ago.
Chris Small, managing director of ABC Business Sales, says the imbalance is stark: “Right now, good businesses that are well prepared are getting strong interest, because there are more buyers than sellers.”
That qualifier, “well prepared”, is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Two very different buyers want two very different things
The buyer pool has split into distinct camps. The larger group are people looking to buy themselves a job, targeting businesses returning $200,000 to $300,000 annually to a single working owner. Small describes the motivation plainly: “The trend certainly is more people looking… to be in charge of their own destiny and creating their own wealth by being their own boss.”
The second, more selective cohort are investors chasing businesses returning at least $1 million in annual profit that can operate under a hired manager. These buyers are competing for a much thinner slice of available listings.
A third force is structural. In January 2025, NZ Herald reported that new migrants, particularly from India, the Philippines and China, were increasingly preferring business ownership over salaried employment, alongside former corporate employees pushed out by restructuring. By that point, buyer demand had risen 39% year-on-year with 23,750 potential purchasers signing confidentiality agreements.
The retirement wave is no longer theoretical
In 2025, NBR reported that almost two-thirds of SME sellers were over 46, with 15.4% older than 65, the first time ABC Business Sales published age data. Just 8.4% of vendors were under 25. The long-predicted boomer succession wave is no longer a projection. It is showing up in the deal pipeline.
Yet many owners are hesitating. Small warns that the window is not indefinitely open: “Interest rates move, banks tighten lending or buyer confidence drops, and the value they were hoping to achieve isn’t there anymore.”
The businesses themselves are actually improving
The deal boom is not happening in a vacuum. Xero’s Small Business Insights data, tracking 144,000 firms, showed sales rose 4.8% year-on-year in the December 2025 quarter, with December alone posting 9.8% growth, well above the 6.2% long-term average. Xero country manager Bridget Snelling says: “This is the clearest evidence we’ve seen in several years that momentum is starting to return.”
Stats NZ confirmed the broader picture: total business sales hit $212 billion in the December 2025 quarter, up $12 billion, while operating profit reached $31 billion, a 13% increase. Small businesses are even being paid faster, averaging just 4.5 days late, the best since Xero’s series began in 2017.
Not every sector is sharing the gains. Professional services led with 8.6% growth, while hospitality managed just 0.5%. Regionally, Canterbury posted 8.0% growth compared with Auckland’s 4.4% and Wellington’s 3.7%.
Vendor finance plugged the gap banks would not
One structural shift deserves attention. In 2024, RNZ reported that vendor financing helped close 1 in 10 business sales, up from about 1 in 100 the year prior. With banks capping business lending at 30-60% of total value, sellers were stepping in at rates of 12-14%. Small said at the time: “Vendors had more knowledge about the risks in their business and were therefore more comfortable than banks in offering financing.”
The market essentially invented its own credit mechanism because institutional lenders would not fill the gap. That tells you something about both the motivation of boomer sellers and the capital constraints younger buyers face.
The pricing paradox that separates prepared from unprepared
Here is the uncomfortable truth buried in the data. Despite record demand, the NZ Herald reported in January 2025 that average sale prices fell 8% to $781,390, while valuation multiples rose 7%. That is not a contradiction. More smaller deals are being done, dragging the average down. Quality businesses with clean books and reduced owner-dependency are commanding stronger multiples than ever.
The 39 confidentiality agreements per listing is an average. The best businesses are getting fierce competition. The rest are sitting.
If your business cannot function without you for a month, if your financials need explaining over coffee, if your key relationships live in your head rather than a CRM, the record buyer demand means nothing. The market is telling owners exactly what it values. The only question is whether sellers are listening before the window shifts.
Sources
- Strong demand for businesses to buy, but some sellers holding back (2026-04-25)
- New Zealand in a seller’s market as business sales rise (2025-01-15)
- Dealmakers 2025: SME sales data shows 15% of vendors are over 65 (2025-10-16)
- NZ small firms see strongest sales growth in three years (2026-02-26)
- Strongest small business sales growth in three years recorded in December (2025-12-31)
- Business Financial Data: December 2025 Quarter (2026-03-12)
- NZ small firms see strongest sales growth in three years (2026-02-26)
- Vendor financing of business sales skyrockets (2024-04-22)