The maths stopped working. That is not the same as you having failed.

There is no single answer, and that is the most useful thing anyone can tell you at this stage. A trading care home is valued by the profits method: sustainable operating profit multiplied by a figure reflecting the quality of the asset and the reliability of that profit. Published transaction evidence puts multiples in a range of roughly five to twelve times, and capital values anywhere from £30,000 to £360,000 per bed — a spread so wide that any per-bed rule of thumb is close to useless on its own. What sets your position within that range is a short list: en-suite and wet room provision, room sizes, the proportion of private payers against council-funded residents, occupancy, size, the CQC rating, the building type, and whether it is freehold. But the far more important point is that a trading value is only one of three figures. There is also what the home is worth closed but still equipped as a care home, to someone who wants to reopen it — a real market, since a third of homes that close sit in areas with a shortage of en-suite beds. And there is what the building alone is worth with vacant possession, for conversion to housing or another use. For a thirty-year-old converted house in an expensive postcode with rooms too small to modernise, the third figure is frequently the largest. Working out which of the three is highest is the actual decision, and almost nobody is told there is a choice.

No, and this is the single most common and most damaging misunderstanding in the sector. Advisers report it explicitly as the biggest gap between what vendors expect and what they are offered. The profits-method figure is one number covering everything: the property interest, the business goodwill, the locational goodwill and the fixtures and fittings. It cannot be broken into parts, and there is no separate bricks-and-mortar component sitting underneath it waiting to be added. The reason is straightforward once you see it. A buyer is purchasing the right to earn that profit stream, and the building is the thing that produces it — you cannot sell the profit and keep the building, or sell the building and keep the profit. Paying for both would be paying twice for the same asset. Where the confusion does something useful is when you invert it. If you look at the going-concern figure and think the building must surely be worth more than that, you may well be right — and that is not an argument for adding them together, it is a signal that the home may be worth more sold empty for another use than sold as a trading business. That is exactly what the tool on this page is built to test, and it is the finding that brokers are least likely to volunteer, because a redevelopment sale is a smaller job for everyone involved.

Because a valuation does not value your business as you run it. It values the property's trading potential in the hands of what the standards call a reasonably efficient operator — a competent third party running the home properly, on market terms. That cuts both ways and the first part is in your favour. Money you draw yourself, salaries paid to family members, rent paid to your own pension fund or property company, and genuine one-off costs are all added back, because a buyer would not incur them. Then comes the part nobody enjoys. A notional registered manager's salary is deducted, whether or not you have ever paid yourself one, because the buyer will have to employ a manager. And a notional head office charge is deducted for the finance, HR, payroll, rota and compliance work you currently do yourself in the evenings, because the buyer will have to pay for that too. For a small owner-operated home those two deductions together routinely come to £60,000 to £90,000 a year, and at a multiple of six or seven that is anything from £350,000 to £600,000 off the price. Personal goodwill — the value that exists because it is you, known in the town for twenty years, trusted by the local authority — is expressly excluded, because it walks out of the door with you on completion. It is a genuinely unfair-feeling piece of arithmetic and it is universal. Far better to know it now than to discover it after an offer has been made and withdrawn.

Longer than you will be told, and the delay is at the end rather than the beginning. Specialist agents report around six months from accepted offer to completion — and that is after preparation and marketing, so from the day you decide to sell, nine to twelve months is a realistic planning assumption. The reason the back end is so long is a step most first-time sellers have never heard of. A CQC registration does not transfer with the business. On an asset sale the incoming provider must obtain its own registration for that location, and it must be in place before completion, because carrying on a regulated activity unregistered is a criminal offence. CQC links the buyer's application and your cancellation application and assesses them together, and it completes registration only when it receives formal confirmation from both sides' solicitors that the transfer has happened. There is no published decision timescale. The only hard figure available is CQC's own performance measure: at March 2025, 28% of applications were more than ten weeks old, against a target of under 22% — and that was a substantial improvement on the 54% recorded a year earlier. Practitioners report four to five months for a new entity. Deals routinely sit exchanged but uncompleted while everybody waits. The exposure is worst for exactly the buyer most likely to want a small home: a first-time buyer with no existing registration. Two things reduce it materially — structuring the deal as a share sale, where the registered entity does not change; and having a registered manager already in post, without which the buyer's application cannot succeed at all.

It is the biggest structural decision in the transaction and it needs to be settled with your solicitor and accountant at heads of terms, not at completion. We will not make it for you, but here is the shape of it. On a share sale you sell the company. The registered provider is unchanged, so the CQC registration survives and there is no new application gating completion — you notify CQC of the change in directors and the nominated individual afterwards instead. Sellers generally prefer this: it is a clean break, the timetable is not hostage to a registration, TUPE does not bite because the employer has not changed, and contracts usually carry across unless there is a change-of-control clause, which local authority contracts fairly often have. On an asset sale the buyer takes the business and the property but not the company. The buyer must be registered before completion, which is the four-to-five-month critical path described above; stamp duty land tax is payable on the property; and TUPE applies, with consultation obligations. Buyers generally prefer it, because they can choose which liabilities they take and are not inheriting your company's history. That preference is precisely why sellers pay for a share sale in warranties: a buyer taking the whole company will want far more warranty and indemnity protection and usually completion accounts. The tax treatment differs materially too, and that is an accountant's question, not ours. The practical point is simply that this decision moves the timetable by months and the net proceeds by a great deal, so make it early and deliberately.

Not necessarily, and this surprises owners more than almost anything else on this page. Specialist agents are clear that a Requires Improvement rating does not necessarily hit the value, provided the operator can show a clear and evidenced improvement plan. Buyers in this market are experienced; they price risk rather than refusing it. What they will not price is a problem with no plan attached. Two things follow. First, if a re-inspection is due shortly and an upgrade to Good looks genuinely achievable, advisers commonly suggest waiting for it before going to market — the difference in multiple is real and the delay is usually shorter than the price improvement is worth. Second, understand that you cannot sell a rating away: since April 2019 the regulatory history follows the location, so a buyer inherits your rating and your inspection reports, and CQC bases the timing of the next assessment on your last one. A change of ownership resets nothing. An Inadequate rating is a different matter, because of what tends to come with it — a local authority suspension of admissions, which stops new residents while existing beds empty through natural attrition. That erodes the trading figure week by week with no fixed end date, and at that point a home is usually being valued on the building rather than the business. If you are in that position, getting the embargo lifted is worth more than anything else you could do before a sale.

Then take longer over it than feels necessary, because closing is the one decision here that cannot be reversed. The registration goes and a buyer would have to obtain their own from scratch; the residents have to be individually assessed and moved; the staff have redundancy rights; and the goodwill evaporates the day you announce it. The process is less prescribed than people assume. There is no statutory notice period for a voluntary closure. You must notify CQC as soon as it is reasonably practicable after deciding, and you can only apply to cancel your registration within thirty days of stopping, or afterwards — and CQC will ask what measures you took to maintain care and who you notified. The real notice period lives in your local authority contract, and councils run formal closure protocols; two months is a commonly published minimum, with a core team covering commissioning, safeguarding, health, legal and transport, individual pre-move assessments and a review of each resident within weeks of the move. One legal point is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as a worry. Where residents are publicly arranged or publicly funded, a private provider is treated as exercising a public function for human rights purposes. The European Court considered a care home closure and accepted that a badly managed transfer of elderly residents could damage life expectancy — but held there was no breach, because there had been a twelve-week consultation, individual assessments, expert evidence considered, friendship groups preserved and a short move. The protection is process. Long notice, proper assessment, real consultation, and keeping people together. Note also that the local authority's emergency duty to step in applies to provider business failure, not to an orderly voluntary closure — so an orderly closure is your responsibility to organise, and the council's to co-operate with.

Almost certainly not, but the order you do things in matters more than the speed. If occupancy has fallen, a rating has slipped and the fee uplift did not cover the wage bill, the instinct is to make a decision this week and be done with it. Resist that for a month. The things that most improve what you eventually walk away with are unglamorous and take a little time: getting a registered manager registered, because without one a buyer cannot be registered either and no asset sale can complete; getting an admissions suspension lifted, because until it is nothing sells at a sensible price; sorting the employment housekeeping, because holiday pay and travel expense liabilities surface in due diligence and get priced against you; and not deferring capital works, because a buyer prices deferred works at their cost plus a risk margin plus the disruption. It is also worth saying, because it is true and because nobody says it: of the homes that closed in England in a recent twelve-month period, 44% held a Good or Outstanding rating on the day they shut. The average one was thirty-one years old with thirty-two beds and no wet rooms. Employer's National Insurance and the wage floor added roughly £125,000 a year to a typical home from April 2025 while council fees moved by a fraction of that. This is a structural squeeze on small older homes, not a verdict on you. What we would suggest, and it costs nothing, is running the numbers on this page first — because if the building turns out to be worth more than the business, the whole shape of the decision changes and several of the things worrying you stop mattering.

We will not tell anybody. No approach to your staff, your residents' families, your commissioners, your council or the CQC, and nothing happens that you have not specifically asked for. A home is marketed on anonymous particulars, with buyers qualified and under confidentiality before it is identified — a care home sale leaking to the staffroom before there is anything to tell people is genuinely damaging and entirely avoidable. On price: the tool on this page is free and always will be. £750 for the written three-figure appraisal — going concern, closed, and vacant possession — with the add-backs and the reasonably-efficient-operator deductions set out line by line, a ranked list of what is dragging your multiple split into fixable and structural, and an honest recommendation that may well be “not yet”. £1,250 for the alternative-use and redevelopment appraisal where the building looks like it may be worth more than the trade, covering the residential conversion on the actual footprint rather than a per-bed average, and a realistic view of the planning position. 1.5% to sell it. What we are not: solicitors, so we will not draft the sale agreement or handle the conveyancing, which is reserved work; CQC consultants, so we will not represent you against an enforcement notice; or your accountant, so we will not tell you whether to structure it as a share sale. And we will never market your business as an investment opportunity to a general audience, because doing that engages the financial promotion rules and we hold no authorisation for it.