No single method values an asset. Over the years, researchers and practitioners have built a number of them, each approaching the same question from a different angle, and we’ve gathered a selection here for anyone who wants to learn how they work.
Two evaluations of the same exact asset can carry different values. This separation is due to the evaluator’s choice of techniques used and the lens they chose to look through.
An evaluation rarely leans on a single technique as it usually takes a combination of multiple to reach an estimate. And evaluators don’t all reach for the same ones. Some techniques are quantitative where parameters go in, a figure comes out, and the same inputs always reach the same answer. Others are qualitative as they are built to catch the real condition of the asset, how deep its market actually runs and what numeric inputs can’t explain. An evaluator may blend both or simply favour one over the other. But what matters most is the judgement they bring to it. In the end, a technique only offers a general estimate for that class of asset, and the role of the evaluator is to apply their experience and judgement to bend that estimate until it fits the specificity of the asset being valued.
An illustration of how an evaluator can use different lenses.
Which one fits depends on the asset, on what evidence actually exists for it, and on what the number has to survive once someone challenges it.
What near-identical assets actually sold for, recently, which is about as direct as evidence gets. You adjust each one towards the subject, one difference at a time, and the number that wins is whichever comp needed the least adjusting. An asking price is not a sale. It’s a negotiation someone hasn’t finished yet.
Two machines with the same hours on the clock aren’t worth the same money, and no dataset tells you which one’s actually held up. You grade condition against a published scale, back it with inspection, service records, invoices, photos, whatever’s actually there. If something couldn’t be checked, that gets written down as unchecked. Not assumed fine.
Comparable sales made statistical. You fit price against whatever variable actually moves it, kilometres, hours, square metres, and read the subject’s value off that line. It needs a real sample size to mean anything, and here’s the catch nobody likes admitting: a line fitted to a market that just turned is a very precise description of a market that’s already gone.
The fallback for assets that barely trade at all, a forming press, a purpose-built facility, something with no real resale market to check against. Price what a modern equivalent costs today, then work backwards. Deduct for age. Deduct again where a newer model just does the job better. Deduct further if the market for whatever it produces has shrunk.
Applies to land before anything else runs, because it’s the method that decides which method comes next. Value follows the most profitable use that’s legally allowed and physically possible, and that’s not always the use the land is currently put to. A use that still needs a permit nobody’s granted is a possibility on paper. It isn’t a fact yet.
The commercial property shorthand for a building that’s already let. Take one year of stabilised net operating income and divide by the yield comparable buildings are trading at. The moment there’s a vacancy coming, a lease about to expire, or a refurbishment on the horizon, that stabilised assumption stops being true, and a full cash flow model is the more honest way to get to a number.
The company equivalent of a comparable sale. You take prices paid in completed deals, restate them as multiples of earnings or revenue, then apply that to the subject and adjust for size, growth, and whatever’s shifted in the market since. Remember that a deal price includes what one particular buyer was willing to pay, synergies nobody else could ever realise. That premium doesn’t travel.
Probably the fastest credible read you can get on a business. Build the peer group around business model, growth, and risk rather than industry label, strip the subject’s earnings of anything that won’t repeat, apply the peer group’s median. A multiple is someone else’s conclusion about a different company. Treat it as a sense check, not a verdict.
The one the finance textbooks call correct, and the usual default for a trading company. Forecast free cash flow year by year, discount it at a rate built from the company’s own cost of capital, add a terminal value at the end. Here’s the part that’s easy to gloss over: most of the answer lives in that terminal value, and nobody can actually observe it. Say that out loud to a client instead of burying it in a footnote.
The workhorse of small business valuation, for a business with a track record worth reading but no real budget worth discounting. Take one normalised year of earnings, divide by a capitalisation rate. It assumes the years ahead look roughly like the year you picked, which is exactly where it falls apart on a business that’s changing fast.
A valuation of the parts, not the whole. Every asset and liability gets restated from book value to market value, including things the accounts never carried and the deferred tax the revaluation itself creates. It says nothing about what those assets earn working together. On a trading business, that makes it a floor, not an answer.
Same exercise, on the assumption the business stops. Each asset class gets discounted for that premise, whether it’s an orderly sale stretched over months or a forced sale compressed into weeks, and the full cost of shutting down comes off the top at the end. Orderly and forced can land half a value apart. State the premise up front, or the number means nothing.
An evaluator picks the method, does the research, and shows the working.