For less than $200,000 you can buy a business in Memphis

Memphis isn’t exactly known for its economic prosperity. It is, if anything, a distribution city. After spending most of my life living near the Bluff City, I can tell you that there is so much blight in that city that it can be difficult for some businesses to take off there even with the amount of wealth generated in the outlying areas.

After a short hunt on BizBuySell.com, I saw that the median asking price for a new business is just about $180,000. That’s a thirty percent drop from the previous quarter.

Why have the businesses decided to lower their asking prices? Well, it likely has something to do with the businesses having almost half of the cash flow that they did in the same period last year. The median cash flow dropped from $117,343 to $60,000. Revenues were also down from $384,000 a year ago to $368,400 for this year.

There are other cities that are having similar issues. Typically, the cost of businesses falls in line with the economic conditions of its neighboring city or town and the real estate market. Real estate values in Memphis have fallen (but to be honest, they haven’t fallen that much in some parts of the city because they weren’t very high to begin with).

Detroit is one of the cities that I have personally noticed taking a major hit in this recession. I read online a few weeks ago that the median home price in the Detroit area was somewhere near $12,000. The only reason that the home prices are so low is because the city is in disrepair and the auto companies that have held the city up for so long started to crumble to pieces this year (and they have been falling apart for some time now).

As far as the businesses in Memphis are concerned, on the BizBuySell website, the types of businesses that are listed include everything from restaurants to cleaning services.

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