States & Cities

If you own a business in Massachusetts and you are thinking about selling it in the next five years, there are two numbers you need to internalize before anything else. The first is 9 percent: the combined Massachusetts state rate on the portion of your gain above the surtax threshold (5 percent base plus the 4 percent Fair Share Amendment surtax). The second is $2 million: the Massachusetts estate tax exemption, which is not indexed for inflation, is not portable between spo

Virginia received $68.5 billion in Department of Defense contract spending in fiscal year 2023. Only Texas received more. That money is concentrated overwhelmingly in one corner of one state: Northern Virginia, where Fairfax County alone has been associated with roughly $490 billion in cumulative federal defense contracts over recent years per GovernmentContractsWon.com. If you own a Virginia business, the buyer pool you are selling into looks fundamentally different from the

Most owners selling a business in Washington DC walk in thinking the process looks the same here as it does in Virginia or Maryland. It does not. A business broker in DC is the advisor who helps you price your company, find serious buyers, negotiate the deal, and close, but in DC the tax structure rewrites the math on every one of those steps. A top-bracket DC seller can pay close to 35 percent of their long-term capital gain to federal and District taxes combined. That is on

Most people hear “Delaware” and think corporate. Fortune 500s. Holding companies. The Court of Chancery. The state pulls in close to 290,000 new business filings a year, and more than two thirds of the Fortune 500 calls Delaware home on paper. Here is what nobody tells you. That has almost nothing to do with the actual market for buying and selling operating businesses inside Delaware’s borders. The real Delaware market is small. Tight. And honestly, if you know how to play i

New Jersey is a state of contradictions for business sellers. You have some of the highest taxes on the East Coast, including a top income tax rate of 10.75% and capital gains taxed at that same rate with no preferential treatment. But you also have 15 to 21 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the state, one of the densest pools of strategic buyers in the country, a pharmaceutical corridor that generates premium acquisition targets, and the largest port on the East Coast f

Here is a pattern I see across New York City sellers more than I would like. The owner runs a profitable restaurant, retail shop, dental practice, or service business. They hire a broker, list it, and only then learn that the most valuable thing they own is not the business at all. It is the lease. A long lease at below-market rent in a desirable Manhattan or Brooklyn block can be worth more than the cash flow it produces. A short lease without renewal options, in the wrong n

North Carolina was ranked the number one state for business in the United States in 2025, and the state's economy grew 3.8% from Q3 2023 to Q3 2024, making it the eighth-fastest growing economy in the country.

A Pennsylvania business broker is an intermediary who values, markets, and negotiates the sale of a privately held Pennsylvania business, typically charging a success fee of 8 to 12 percent for sales under $5 million or a sliding Double Lehman scale on larger deals.