Most owners get asked "do you want to sell?" long before anyone asks why, or what happens the day after. Those two answers decide whether a sale is the right move at all, and which kind. Answer six questions and you will get an honest read on which paths fit your situation, which one to rule out, and what to check before you talk to anybody. No valuation, no number, and nothing here reaches me unless you decide to send it.
Answer what you can on the left. The more you fill in, the sharper the read. If a question does not apply, leave it blank and I will say so rather than guess.
This is not a valuation and it never will be. What a building is worth depends on condition, tenancy, and what the leases actually say, none of which a questionnaire can see. This tool is about direction, not price.
I keep a record of every commercial parcel with a building on it across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach — 76,099 of them as of August 2026. Of those, 56,976 carry a recorded sale above $10,000, which is the closest thing the public record gives you to an actual transfer rather than a deed correction or a family transfer at a dollar.
The median one of those owners bought eleven years ago. Broward runs 11 years, Miami-Dade 12, Palm Beach 10. Fifty-eight percent have held for more than a decade, and thirty percent bought more than twenty years ago. Only about one in five has traded in the last five years.
That number is the reason this tool exists. When you have owned a building for eleven years, the question "what is it worth?" is not the question that actually decides anything. Your basis is old, your depreciation has been running the whole time, the loan you signed was written into a different rate environment, and the leases in place were negotiated by a version of you with different priorities. Two owners of identical buildings on the same street can face completely different right answers, and neither one has anything to do with the price per square foot.
So before anybody talks about value, the useful questions are: what has you thinking about this, and what has to be true the day after you sign. Those two answers rule out most of the options by themselves.
Every one of these is a real path I have seen work. Every one of them is also the wrong answer for somebody. The planner above tells you which ones fit what you told it; this is the plain-English version of each so you can argue with the result.
You deliver the building and you walk. Cleanest structure, widest buyer pool, fastest close. It is the right answer when you do not occupy the space, you do not need the proceeds to do anything specific, and the income in place is stable enough that a buyer can underwrite it without guessing. It is the wrong answer surprisingly often, and the most common reason is the next item on this list.
You sell the building and sign a lease on the same day, so your business never moves. This is the structure most owner-occupants should be looking at and most have never had explained to them. The thing nobody tells you up front: in a sale-leaseback you set the price, because the buyer is buying the lease you just signed. A higher rent produces a higher price and a lower rent produces a lower one, and the right answer depends on whether you would rather have cash now or a cheaper occupancy cost for the next fifteen years. Decide the rent and term you would actually sign before you talk to a single buyer, because once you are negotiating both at once you will lose track of which one you are trading.
You sell and roll the proceeds into another property, deferring the capital gain. It works well when you already wanted to own something else — a bigger building, a better location, something with less management. It does not work if you want the money. The proceeds have to go through a qualified intermediary and into replacement property on a clock: 45 days to identify, 180 days to close. I am a broker and not a tax advisor, so your CPA and a qualified intermediary decide whether this is available to you, not me. What I will say from the brokerage side is that the clock is the real risk. Owners who start identifying replacement property after they close usually overpay for whatever is still available on day 40.
If the actual goal is capital and not exit, selling is an expensive way to get it. You pay a commission, you pay the tax, and you lose an asset you have already held through the hard part. Pulling equity out through a refinance keeps the building, keeps the basis and keeps the depreciation. The catch is coverage: the new debt service has to work against real income, not optimistic income, and if you are the tenant then a lender is looking at your business as much as the building. Worth pricing before you assume a sale is the answer.
A vacant or half-vacant building sells to a much smaller pool at a much worse number, because the buyer is being asked to take your leasing risk and they will price that risk generously in their own favor. One signed lease at a defensible rent can move the sale price more than any amount of marketing. This path costs you time — realistically six to eighteen months depending on the space — so it is only available if nothing is forcing your hand. If something is forcing your hand, it is off the table and you should know that going in rather than discovering it three months into a listing.
If you are selling the operating company and you also own the building it sits in, those are two assets with two different buyer pools and two different pricing logics. A business buyer will happily take the real estate as part of the package, and they will value it as a line item in a business deal rather than as a building. Sometimes bundling is genuinely right — a single buyer who wants both may pay for the convenience. But you should know both numbers separately before you decide, and the usual sequence is to sell the business subject to a lease you keep, which converts you from an operator into a landlord with a tenant you already trust.
When the pressure is coming from ownership rather than from the building, a sale is often just the most expensive way to resolve a disagreement. One partner buying out another, or bringing in new capital to take a partner out, keeps the asset intact and avoids the tax event. Before anything else happens, somebody needs to read the operating agreement — the buy-sell provisions, any right of first refusal, and how value gets determined if the parties disagree. That document frequently already dictates the answer, and I have watched owners spend months negotiating something their own agreement had settled years earlier. Your attorney, not your broker, is the one to read it.
Sometimes the honest answer. If nothing is forcing a decision, the debt is comfortable, and the money would have nowhere better to go, then selling converts a performing asset into a tax bill and a search problem. Curiosity about what a building is worth is a completely legitimate reason to ask — it is just not, by itself, a reason to sell. The version of holding I would push back on is holding while a loan maturity approaches with no plan, because that is not a decision, it is a deadline you have chosen not to look at.
Not because I am holding it back, but because six dropdowns cannot see the things that decide it. Value on a commercial building comes from the income the leases actually produce, the condition of the roof and the slab and the mechanicals, the zoning and what it permits, the parking count that exists on the ground rather than the one in the listing, and comparable sales close enough in submarket and size to mean something. A questionnaire has access to none of that.
Anything online that hands you a single number for a commercial property is either extrapolating from an assessed value that was never built to predict a sale price, or applying a market cap rate to income it has guessed at. Both produce numbers that feel precise and are not. When I do give a range, it comes with the comparable sales it came from and what would move it in either direction, so you can check my work.
If you want that, it is a Broker's Opinion of Value and it is free. But I would rather you run this planner first, because a number is only useful once you know what you would do with it.
Nobody can answer that from the outside, and anyone who tries is selling you something. What decides it is why you are thinking about it and what has to be true the day after you sign. If your business occupies the space and needs to stay, you are looking at a sale-leaseback, not a sale. If you want to buy something else, a 1031 exchange changes the math. If what you actually need is capital, a refinance keeps the asset and skips the tax event. And if nothing is forcing a decision, holding is a real answer rather than a failure to act. Those five situations point five different directions, and not one of them turns on what the building is worth.
An unsolicited offer proves there is at least one buyer. It almost never proves there is only one, and that is the assumption the offer is quietly relying on. Buyers who approach owners directly are doing it precisely to avoid competing, and the discount they are pricing in is the cost of your not knowing what else is out there. That does not make the offer bad — sometimes it is genuinely strong, and sometimes the buyer has a reason to want your specific building that nobody else has. Find out which before you respond. It costs you nothing to know.
No, and nothing you type here reaches me unless you press send. The planner runs entirely in your browser. If the result comes back "hold," that is a real answer and I would tell you the same thing in person. I would rather be the broker you call in three years because I was straight with you now than the one who talked you into a transaction you did not need.
Yes — that structure is a sale-leaseback, and it is common. You sell the real estate and sign a lease back on the same day, so nothing about your operations changes. Your rent and lease term become the main drivers of what a buyer will pay, which means you are effectively choosing between more cash at closing and a lower occupancy cost afterward. Owners who go in without having decided that tradeoff tend to get talked into whichever one benefits the buyer.
Then you have a real choice to make about sequence. Selling vacant puts your building in front of a much smaller pool — mostly owner-users who happen to need your exact size and configuration right now, and investors who will price the vacancy pessimistically because they are the ones carrying it. Leasing first takes months but changes what you are selling from a risk into an income stream. Which one wins depends almost entirely on whether you have time. If you do not, that is not a failure, it is just a constraint worth naming out loud.
Under Florida law a licensee is presumed to be operating as a transaction broker unless a single agent relationship is established in writing. Transaction brokerage means limited representation and a duty of honesty and fair dealing to both sides. Single agency means the broker owes you loyalty, confidentiality and full disclosure, and cannot represent the buyer. For commercial and rental transactions the written disclosure requirement in the statute does not apply, which in practice means many owners never have this conversation at all. You are entitled to ask which one you are getting, and to ask for it in writing.
No. I am a Florida licensed real estate broker. Anything on this page touching 1031 timing, depreciation recapture, estate planning, entity structure or loan terms is general education about how these transactions usually work, not advice about your situation. Your CPA and your attorney get the final word, and any broker who tells you otherwise is telling you something they are not licensed to tell you.
If the planner pointed somewhere and you want to go one level deeper, these are the next stops.