The listing discloses gross revenue, SDE, inventory value, monthly rent, and lease expiration, and it provides a five-year revenue range ($1.5M–$2.3M) rather than a single flattering year. That range is more useful than a point estimate, because it shows the volatility band a buyer is underwriting. A 25% SDE margin on a collision shop is credible — neither implausibly high in the way that flags a fabricated listing, nor thin enough to leave no room for error.

Three points withheld. EBITDA is not disclosed, so the buyer cannot separate owner compensation and discretionary add-backs from operating profit. The other income the seller references is unquantified. And the 2.79x multiple prices the business against SDE that includes an owner who works a few hours a week — if a buyer intends to remain absentee, they will need to hire or retain management, and that cost is not netted out anywhere.

The seller carries $250,000 at 8% over five years — eighteen percent of the purchase price, subordinate to whatever senior acquisition financing the buyer arranges. This matters more than the dollar amount suggests. A seller who takes cash and walks has no continuing interest in whether the business survives the transition. A seller carrying paper for five years does. Seller financing at this proportion is a soft form of warranty: the seller putting their own recovery behind the buyer's success. It is also the single most common structural feature separating SMB deals that close from SMB deals that fall apart in diligence.

At 8%, the note is priced fairly — roughly in line with or slightly below current SBA 7(a) variable rates, not a punitive carry. Three points withheld because the senior structure is undisclosed. The listing does not state whether the business is SBA-eligible, whether it has been pre-qualified, or what a lender has said about it. SBA pre-qualification is a genuine third-party underwriting signal, and its absence here means the buyer is the first outside party to look at the books.

The lease is the protection. It runs to May 1, 2040 — roughly fourteen years — at a disclosed, fixed $11,500 per month. Collision repair is a fixed-facility business. A down-draft spray booth, three in-ground lifts, a permitted fire suppression system, and a hundred-car storage yard do not relocate. A shop that loses its lease does not move; it dies, or it rebuilds from zero at a cost approaching the purchase price. In this asset class, lease duration is not an administrative footnote — it is the difference between owning a business and renting the right to operate one until a landlord decides otherwise.

Fourteen years of runway at a known rent, on a facility renovated last year, removes the single largest structural risk in the category. Compare this against the Brentwood, New Hampshire construction materials distributor reviewed as Worth Watching in this same issue, whose yard lease expires five months from now with no renewal terms disclosed. Rent of $138,000 annually against $2,000,000 of revenue is 6.9% — reasonable for a 5,500 square foot facility with a large yard in Suffolk County.

Four points withheld for what is not protected. Thirty days of hands-on training is thin for a business with twelve employees and insurer relationships that turn on personal trust. No employee retention arrangements are disclosed. No non-compete is mentioned. And critically — the lease is presumably assignable, but the listing does not say so, and landlord consent to assignment is not addressed. A fourteen-year lease that a landlord can block the transfer of is not a fourteen-year lease.

The terms are laid out with unusual clarity for a brokered listing: asking price, seller note amount, rate, and term; inventory value and its exclusion from price; monthly rent and lease expiration; employee count and split; equipment inventory in specific detail.

Three points withheld. Broker commission structure is not disclosed — standard, but it affects net proceeds and therefore seller flexibility. Working capital requirements post-close are not addressed; a shop carrying $2M of revenue with insurer payment cycles measured in weeks needs a cushion the listing does not size. And the $30,000 of inventory sitting outside the asking price is a modest but real additional capital call.

This is a single operating business being sold by an owner, not a fund with LP returns to benchmark. Track record is measured differently: does the business run without the owner, and has it run long enough to prove it? On the first question, the evidence is good. Twelve employees. Owners on site a few hours a week. A business generating $2,000,000 of revenue that the owners describe as running absentee while they attend to other business interests. That is either a business with real management infrastructure or a listing that overstates its absentee character, and the employee count and facility scale make the former more plausible than the latter.

On the second question, there is a problem the buyer must resolve. The listing data field states the business was established in 2021. The seller's own facility description states income has been steady for the last five years, ranging between $1.5 and $2.3 million. Those two statements are reconcilable — a predecessor operation, an entity restructuring, a change of ownership in 2021 that reset the established date — but the listing does not reconcile them, and the buyer is being asked to underwrite five years of revenue history against an entity that may only be five years old, or may only have existed for the last four.

Which entity's tax returns is the buyer reviewing? Which entity holds the DRP agreements? Which entity is party to the 2040 lease? These are not academic questions and the listing does not answer them. Six points withheld on that unresolved inconsistency and the absence of any operator name or history.

The business is a specialist. Collision repair and mechanical service, from a purpose-built 5,500 square foot facility with a down-draft spray booth and a mixing room — this is not a general automotive shop that added collision work. The equipment schedule reads like a shop that reinvested: three new lifts, a new tire machine and balancer, new compressors, a permitted suppression system.

The May 2025 ground-up renovation is the strongest signal in this pillar. An owner who spends heavily on a facility a year before selling is either an operator who reinvests as a matter of course, or one preparing the asset for sale. Both are fine outcomes for a buyer — the second is arguably better, because it means the capital expenditure that normally follows an SMB acquisition has already been made, by someone else's money, and is already reflected in the asking price rather than lurking behind it. Two points withheld: no operator name, no operating history disclosed for the individual behind the business.

This is where the deal is weakest, and it cannot be repaired without an NDA. The Docket's standard requires two independent confirmation points. This listing offers one: the listing itself, which is detailed and internally coherent on facility, equipment, and lease. There is no second.

The business name is not disclosed. There is no website. There is no Google Business profile that can be checked. There is no review record. There is no independent digital footprint of any kind — and, notably, the seller confirms this: the current owners do not advertise, and adding a social media presence is listed as the primary growth lever.

That absence is a genuine growth lever and this publication does not penalize a business for having one. But it does mean there is no public record against which to test a single claim in the listing. A collision shop with 200 Google reviews has an auditable customer record. This one has nothing. The internal inconsistency on the establishment date compounds the problem: the one document a buyer has is the one document that contradicts itself. Five points withheld. This score would move materially on the disclosure of the business name and a single independent confirmation point.

Collision repair is one of the few genuinely non-discretionary consumer services. Vehicles are damaged at a rate driven by traffic density, weather, and driver behavior, not by consumer confidence. When a car is undrivable, it is repaired — and in the overwhelming majority of cases, an insurer pays for it. Demand does not compress in a downturn the way discretionary automotive spending does.

Suffolk County is one of the densest vehicle markets in the United States: high registration counts, heavy commuter traffic, and severe winter conditions. The facility sits on a major north–south roadway with, per the seller, surrounding medical centers and shopping centers driving traffic volume, and no direct competition in the immediate area.

The no-direct-competition claim should be treated as a seller's characterization, not a fact — collision repair markets in dense suburban counties are rarely uncontested. But the locational logic is sound. Two points withheld: the competitive claim is unverified, and Long Island has a substantial installed base of independent and chain collision operators, including consolidators, within a reasonable tow radius.

The financing math works, which is not something this publication has been able to say about most of the acquisitions in this issue. At a $1,395,000 purchase price with $250,000 carried by the seller at 8%, a buyer arranging SBA 7(a) financing on the remaining balance faces annual debt service of roughly $135,000–$150,000 on the senior piece at current rates, plus approximately $61,000 annually on the seller note if amortized over its five-year term. Total debt service lands in the neighborhood of $200,000.

Against $500,000 of stated SDE, that leaves roughly $300,000 of free cash flow before the buyer's own compensation and before the cost of any management hire required to preserve the absentee structure. Coverage is comfortable — approximately 2.5x on debt service — with real headroom for the revenue volatility the seller's own $1.5M–$2.3M range implies. Two points withheld: at the low end of that range, a proportionally compressed SDE would tighten coverage meaningfully, and the buyer should stress-test the model at $1.5M rather than $2M.

Collision repair volumes are stable and secularly supported. Two headwinds are worth naming honestly, and neither appears in the listing.

ADAS calibration. Modern vehicles carry advanced driver assistance systems — cameras, radar, lidar — that require recalibration after most structural repairs. Shops that cannot perform calibration in-house either turn work away or send it out at a margin cost. The equipment schedule in this listing does not mention calibration equipment. In a shop that renovated in 2025, its absence is worth asking about directly.

Insurer labor rate pressure. Direct repair program relationships come with insurer-set labor rates, and insurers have been aggressive on rate suppression and on steering repair volume to preferred networks and consolidators. The margin on DRP work is structurally lower than on customer-pay work, and it is set by a counterparty with far more leverage than the shop.

The listing states, in the facility description, that the shop is currently direct repair for a couple of big accounts. That single clause is the most important sentence in the listing and it contains no information. A direct repair program agreement is the arrangement under which an insurer routes claim volume to a specific shop. In a shop generating $2,000,000 of revenue, DRP relationships are frequently the majority of the book. They are also:

— Terminable. Insurers cancel DRP agreements. They do so for performance metrics, for cycle time, for CSI scores, for network consolidation, and sometimes for no articulated reason at all.

— Concentrated by design. A couple of accounts is not diversification. If two insurers represent, say, 60% of revenue and one leaves, the business does not lose 30% of its revenue — it loses 30% of its revenue against a largely fixed cost base of twelve employees and a $138,000 lease. The SDE impact is far more than proportional.

— Relationship-dependent. DRP relationships are frequently held by an individual — a shop owner, a manager — and are not always contractually assignable in a change of control.

A buyer must establish, before proceeding: which insurers, what percentage of revenue each represents, what the agreement terms are, when they renew, whether they survive a change of ownership, and whether the insurer has been notified of the sale. If the answer to the last question is no, the buyer is acquiring a revenue stream that the counterparty does not yet know is changing hands.

Establish which legal entity is being sold, when it was formed, and whether the five years of revenue history the seller cites belongs to it or to a predecessor. Then confirm that the DRP agreements, the 2040 lease, and the operating licenses all sit inside the entity being purchased. An asset sale that leaves the DRP agreements in a predecessor entity is not the deal the listing describes.

The listing says the owners are on site a few hours a week. It does not say who runs the shop when they are not there. Is there a general manager? A shop foreman? A named individual whose departure would leave the buyer running a twelve-person collision operation personally? Thirty days of transition training is adequate if a management layer exists and inadequate if it does not. Identify that person, and find out whether they are staying.

Insurer payment cycles on collision claims run weeks. A $2M-revenue shop with parts on order and vehicles in the bay carries a real receivables and work-in-progress position that the $30,000 inventory figure does not describe. Size it before closing, and fund it — it sits on top of the purchase price and the down payment.

Ask what calibration work the shop currently performs in-house, what it sublets, and what it turns away. In a 2025-renovated facility, the answer should be good. If it is not, the capital requirement is real and near-term.