A dealership has three prices, and one depends on the manufacturer

"What is my dealership worth?" is the question an owner asks when the phone rings, when a son or daughter says they won't be joining the business, or when the manufacturer announces a new showroom standard. In Italy it is also a question almost nobody answers with numbers: buyers don't publish what they paid, and sellers have signed a confidentiality clause.

The numbers exist elsewhere. In the United States a few investment banks publish every quarter what buyers pay for a dealership, brand by brand. In the United Kingdom dealer groups are listed, and when one is bought the offer documents are public. Put together, they say something that holds for an Italian dealership too: value is not one number. It is three numbers, worked out in three different ways.

A dealership's value has three parts, and only one is priced as a multiple

When a dealership is sold, three things are sold at once.

The property, if you own it: the showroom, the workshop, the forecourt. It is valued as property, with a survey, a market rent and a yield. The brand on the sign barely matters.

The net assets: new and used cars in stock, parts, workshop equipment and receivables, less the debt that funds them, starting with the floor plan. They are valued line by line, usually at an adjusted book value: a used car that has sat for eight months is worth less than the accounts say, and fully depreciated equipment can be worth more.

Goodwill: what a buyer pays on top of the property and the things. It is the value of future profits, meaning the customers, the territory, the team and above all the franchise. It is the only part priced as a multiple, and the only part that can be worth nothing.

You can see it in a deal we have written about before. When Asbury Automotive bought the Herb Chambers dealerships in 2025, out of a net price of about $1.45 billion, about $610 million went to real estate, about $85 million to vehicles, parts and equipment, and $750 million to goodwill, according to Asbury's annual filing. Three cheques inside one. Anyone who talks about "the multiple" without saying which of the three it applies to is not yet talking about value.

In the United States goodwill sells for 3 to 10.5 times earnings, and the brand makes the difference

Haig Partners, a US investment bank that specialises in dealerships, publishes every quarter the multiples at which goodwill (blue sky, in the American term) changes hands for each brand. The definition is precise: a multiple of adjusted pre-tax cash flow, separate from the value of real estate, inventory and fixed assets. Adjusted means profit is restated with a market rent, a normal salary for the owner and no one-off items.

In the Q2 2026 report the spread is very wide. Lexus trades at 9.5 to 10.5 times, Toyota at 7.25 to 9, Honda at 6 to 7. At the bottom of the table Ford sits at 3.5 to 4.5 and Stellantis at 3 to 4. The same profit, in the same country, in the same quarter, is worth three times as much under one brand as under another.

The reason is one anyone who has worked in a dealership knows: the multiple doesn't pay for this year's profit, it pays for confidence that the profit will last. A brand with products that sell, a manufacturer that leaves the network a margin and customers who come back to the workshop makes profit predictable, and predictable profit is worth more years. A brand that is losing share, changes its executives every year and asks for showroom investment makes profit uncertain, and a buyer pays less for it.

Haig also says how not to use its table: these are national averages and should not be applied directly to a dealership's reported earnings. That goes double for an Italian dealership, with thinner margins, a different mix of new, used and service, and different buyers. What travels from the American table is not the number. It is the structure: goodwill is paid on adjusted profit, and the brand moves the multiple more than anything else.

In Europe listed groups have changed hands at around six times pre-tax profit, close to net asset value

Europe has no brand-by-brand table. What it has are deals on listed groups, where price and accounts are public.

The cleanest case is Lookers, one of the largest UK dealer groups. In 2023 Global Auto Holdings, part of the Canadian Alpha Auto group, offered 120 pence a share, about £465 million for the whole company, and then raised the offer to 130 pence. At the final price the equity was worth about £504 million, on our arithmetic from the offer figures. In 2022 Lookers had made £82.7 million of underlying pre-tax profit, had net assets of £431.9 million and property on the balance sheet at £290.5 million, with more cash than bank debt.

On those numbers, the group changed hands at about 6.1 times pre-tax profit and 1.17 times net assets. And the property alone was carried at almost six tenths of the price. The buyer paid little more than what was inside, plus a modest amount of goodwill.

The stock market tells the same story from another angle. Vertu Motors, another listed UK group, bought back 17.4 million of its own shares for £10.6 million in the year to February 2026: about 61 pence a share, against tangible net assets of 75.9 pence a share reported in the same results. The board writes that the shares are "materially undervalued" relative to that value. At the prices it bought back at, in other words, the market valued the group at around 80% of what it owned in property, cars and equipment, net of debt. On the stock market goodwill was worth nothing, and then some.

These are large listed groups in a market different from ours. But they teach something that holds for a provincial dealership too: in Europe most of the price is property and net assets, and goodwill is the small, contestable part. An owner who thinks of the business as "so many times profit" risks counting the property twice, or counting goodwill the market doesn't pay for.

The only public number on a single European dealership we found points the same way: Hectelion, a Swiss valuation firm, describes the sale of a dealership for an international brand to a trade buyer, with EBITDA multiples observed between 5 and 7 times. It is one case, and the multiple is one of four methods used. We cite it for what it is.

Goodwill rests on a franchise you don't own, and the manufacturer has to say yes

This is where a dealership parts company with almost every other business. The most valuable thing it sells, the right to sell and repair a brand's cars in a territory, doesn't belong to it. It is a contract with the manufacturer, and a contract of that kind usually doesn't pass to a new owner without the manufacturer's consent.

The sale of Pendragon's dealership and leasing business, British, to the American group Lithia, announced in September 2023, shows it clearly. One of the conditions in the announcement was manufacturer consent: the deal would only complete if the counterparties to the franchise agreements representing at least 70% of the pre-tax profit of the dealerships being sold had said yes. In other words, a buyer doesn't pay for goodwill until the manufacturers have confirmed the goodwill will come with the business.

There are three consequences for the price.

The manufacturer also chooses the buyer. A manufacturer that is shrinking its network, or wants a bigger group in the territory, may approve one buyer and not another. The best price is the best buyer among those the manufacturer will accept.

The franchise has a term and a notice period. How long the agreement has left, how much notice the manufacturer needs to end it and what it says about showroom standards are valuation questions, not paperwork. Goodwill calculated on ten years of profit, on a franchise that can be ended with a year's notice, is a fantasy number.

Required investment comes off the price. If the manufacturer asks for the showroom to be rebuilt within two years, the buyer will pay for it and deduct it from the price. It is one of the reasons Haig's table moves multiples down, and in Europe, with the move to the agency model, it counts even more.

European rules offer no backstop. Since June 2013 new car sales have had no sector-specific regulation: they fall under the general vertical agreements regulation, now 2022/720, which sets no minimum notice periods. The sector regulation, extended in 2023 to May 2028, covers only parts and service. What counts is the contract you signed, not a European rule that protects it.

The multiple applies to the accounts the buyer rebuilds, not to yours

The second mistake, after applying the multiple to the wrong number, is applying it to the wrong accounts.

No buyer values the profit in your accounts. They rebuild it line by line, as we described in the piece on the first offer: owner and family pay brought to market level, a market rent on the property if you own it and the business doesn't pay one, the true cost of the floor plan, used stock written down to what it is really worth, manufacturer bonuses weighted by how repeatable they are. The multiple applies to that number, which is usually lower than yours.

And part of the price may not arrive at signing. If the buyer proposes paying some of it in later years, linked to results, that part is measured on a profit largely driven by the manufacturer, and should be counted for what it is.

Selling the shares and selling the business are two different deals, with two different prices

The last variable, often decided too late, is what exactly is being sold.

In a share sale the buyer takes the whole company with everything in it: contracts, employees, disputes, tax liabilities, including the ones nobody has found yet. That is why they ask for deeper due diligence and broader warranties, and if they don't get them, they lower the price.

In an asset sale (in Italy, the sale of the going concern) the buyer takes the business and leaves the company with you. On earlier debts, though, the Italian civil code is clear: the seller is not released from them without the creditors' consent, and the buyer is also liable if they appear in the accounting books (article 2560). The buyer also pays registration tax on the values transferred, goodwill included, while a share sale is taxed differently. These differences change what a buyer is willing to pay, and what ends up in your pocket.

In either case the property can stay out. Keeping it and leasing it to the buyer turns part of the sale into income, and takes out of the price the part a buyer has least reason to pay a premium for.

What your dealership is worth is the sum of three calculations, and goodwill is the one to defend

An honest answer to the question in the title takes three separate calculations.

The value of the property, with a survey and a market rent, whatever brand is on the sign. The value of the net assets, line by line, with stock brought to its real value. And goodwill: profit rebuilt the way the buyer will rebuild it, multiplied by a number that depends on the brand, the territory, the investment the manufacturer is asking for and how much of the franchise is left.

The first two are close to certain and can be prepared in advance. The third is what gets negotiated, and it is the one an owner can raise before selling: clean, documented profit, a team that stays, a workshop that is busy, a relationship with the manufacturer that doesn't worry a buyer. These are the numbers we work through with owners on the sell side of an M&A mandate, before the first number arrives from someone else.

In 2026 Italy has 710 dealership owners, 5% fewer than the year before, behind 3,794 franchise outlets (Quintegia, Dealer Network Study). Every year some of them find out what their business is worth at the moment they sell it. It pays to know beforehand.

Sources: Haig Partners, The Haig Report, Q2 2026 (August 2026), brand multiple table and blue sky definition; Lookers plc, offer announcement of 20 June 2023, interim results of 22 August 2023 and 2022 results of 5 April 2023; Vertu Motors plc, results for the year ended 28 February 2026; Pendragon plc, announcement of the disposal to Lithia, 18 September 2023; Asbury Automotive Group, annual filing for 2025; Hectelion, valuation mandate case study; European Commission, SWD(2026) 175 final, and Regulation (EU) 2023/822; Italian civil code, art. 2560; Quintegia, Dealer Network Study 2026. The Lookers and Vertu multiples are our arithmetic on the published figures.