Reason for sale

I’m pretty big into cars. If you’ve spent any amount of time on car auction sites, you’ll frequently see one question coming up: What’s the reason for the sale? When you’ve got an asset like a car that can potentially have 47 things wrong with it at once, you’ll likely want to know if it’s being sold because some problems came up, or if the owner is just legitimately ready to sell it. The same concept applies with websites!

Most of the terrible websites that you’ll find are being sold because something is going wrong with them and the owners want to offload them quickly before they totally tank and become worthless.

While proper due diligence and analyzing the traffic and revenue trends will usually tell you if a website is failing, it’s always a great idea to ask the owner why they’re selling if they haven’t put that information in their listing.

Most of the time, you’ll get the answer that the website owner has owned the site for a while and they’re ready to cash out and put the money towards another venture. This is a totally legitimate reason!

Other times you may get the answer that the owner feels that the website is stagnating and they can’t grow it anymore. If you can spot some quick wins, this is a goldmine answer!

If a website owner is being very vague about their reason for selling and something doesn’t line up, that’s usually an indication that something is off. There should be no reason for a website owner to lie about this part!