Boarding is the one pet vertical where the paperwork is worth more than the plant.
A buyer can build runs. They can put in drainage and fencing and a heated block. What they cannot do, in most of Australia, is get a new animal boarding establishment approved anywhere near a town in under two years, if at all. Council after council has made it harder, neighbours object as a matter of routine, and the sites that are already consented are the sites that exist.
That is what you are selling. The rest is the story you tell about it.
Start with the consent, because the buyer will
Pull the development consent out and read every condition on it before you speak to anyone.
The number of animals you are approved to hold is the ceiling on the business, permanently. If your consent says sixty and you have been running eighty through the Christmas fortnight, you do not have a busy kennel. You have an unapproved one, and a buyer's solicitor will find it in the first week of due diligence. That discovery does not reduce the price. It ends the sale.
Development consent generally runs with the land rather than the operator, which is the good news. But separate operating approvals, registrations and licences can sit with the person, and the rules differ by state and by council. Write to your council, ask in plain terms what a new operator would have to do, and get the answer on letterhead. A buyer with that letter in the data room pays more and settles faster than one who has to go and ask themselves.
While you are in there: check the conditions you have quietly stopped complying with. Hours of operation. Noise attenuation. Waste water. Landscaping and screening. Vegetation you were meant to plant a decade ago. Every one of those is a discount waiting to be found.
Your annual occupancy figure is hiding the year
Boarding does not run at a steady rate and presenting it as though it does is a mistake that costs sellers money.
Say the kennel averages 58% occupancy across the year. That single figure covers a Christmas fortnight at 100% with a waitlist, four school holiday blocks in the seventies, and long stretches of February and August in the twenties.
A buyer who is given the 58% assumes it is 58% everywhere and values a mediocre business. A buyer who is shown the shape sees something better: a site that fills completely when demand exists, which means the constraint in the quiet months is demand rather than the kennel, and demand is a thing a new owner can go and get.
So split it. Peak weeks, school holidays, and ordinary weeks, each with its own occupancy and its own average nightly rate. Then show the waitlist or the turn-aways during peak, because that is the clearest evidence there is that the site is under-priced rather than over-built.
Petboost reports utilisation by period and by resource, so peak and quiet split out rather than averaging into one number that flatters nobody. Run it for the last three years and put all three in the data room.
The forward book is an asset and a debt at the same time
Sixty stays booked for the Christmas period is the best thing on your balance sheet and one of the trickier things to settle.
Every deposit you have taken on a stay that has not happened yet is money the buyer has to deliver a service for. Same principle as a prepaid pack: cash you already have, work somebody else now does. It comes off the price or it gets apportioned at settlement, and either way you need the schedule.
Produce it per booking: dates, dog, total, deposit held, balance due. Not a total. A schedule. The buyer's accountant will want to see each line, and the seller who hands it over on day one is the seller who keeps control of the number.
The same goes for any package credits or gift vouchers still outstanding. In Petboost the Packages tab gives you outstanding balance, remaining uses and a customer-level export. Credits there do not expire, so a balance sold years ago is still a live obligation, and it is better that you find it than that they do.
Freehold changes what you are selling
If you own the land, you are running two transactions in one and they have different buyers.
The property has a value set by the market for rural or industrial land in your area. The business has a value set by its earnings. Some buyers want both, some want the land and would rather run their own operation, and a few want the business and would prefer to lease from you. Knowing which of those you will accept before the first offer arrives is worth more than any negotiating tactic.
If you lease, the term is the price. A kennel is not a business you can relocate: the consent is attached to that site and nowhere else. Two years left on a lease turns a saleable business into a wasting asset. Renew or exercise the option before you go to market, not after.
Twelve months of preparation
Work the quiet months. A kennel that fills over Christmas and empties in February is priced on the average. Anything that lifts the off-peak line lifts the multiple directly: midweek rates, a long-stay rate for people away on work, repeat-customer benefits, a daycare line using the same site and the same staff on days the runs are empty.
Make the repeat business visible. Boarding customers are annual or twice-annual by nature, so a twelve-month window undercounts your regulars badly. Pull the three-year view and show how many households have come back in consecutive years. That is your recurring revenue and nobody will find it unless you show them.
Reduce the person-dependency. If you take every booking on your own mobile and the vaccination checks live in your head, the business does not run without you. Move the bookings onto a system, put the vaccination rules in writing, and write the standing orders down: feeding, medication, what happens at 2am, what happens when a dog stops eating.
Get the records straight. Three years of reconciled accounts, per-night revenue, the occupancy split, the forward book, and the staff entitlements.
Talk to an accountant early. Whether the sale is of shares or assets, whether the going concern provisions apply, and which small business capital gains tax concessions you qualify for are all questions with long lead times. The ATO publishes the concessions and their eligibility tests; your accountant tells you which apply to you.
What the site tells a buyer about you
They will walk the runs. Everyone does.
Drainage is the first thing an experienced buyer looks at, because a floor that does not fall to the drain is a rebuild rather than a repair. Then fencing, and specifically double-gating, because one escaped dog is the story that ends a kennel. Then the heating and cooling in the block, the fire equipment and its service tags, the quarantine or isolation area, and whether there is anywhere to separate a dog that is not coping.
None of that has to be new. It has to be maintained, and it has to look maintained, because a buyer who finds one thing bodged assumes there are ten more they have not found.
The handover
Boarding handovers are usually longer than grooming ones, and they should be. The relationships are annual, so a customer who does not meet you might not encounter the new owner until next Christmas, by which point they have found somewhere else.
Write to every customer who has stayed in the last three years, in your own words, before settlement. Introduce the new owner by name. Say what is staying the same. It is the cheapest retention work in the whole deal.
Then stay through one peak period if you can. A Christmas in a kennel is not something you can explain in a document, and a new owner who runs their first one alone will make expensive mistakes with your name still on the sign.
See Reporting and Intelligence · Petboost for pet boarding · Buying a boarding business