No Canadian regulator or statistical agency publishes an average days-on-market figure for a business sale. What exists instead is a set of real, sourced regulatory clocks that stack onto every deal, and one marketplace's own illustrative sector ranges.
Headline figure
No published figure
No Canadian government body, industry association or statistics agency publishes an average or median time-to-sell for a private business. The closest thing on the market, Deavo's per-sector listing platform, states its own ranges as “illustrative ranges based on comparable Canadian transactions” and explicitly not a prediction — not a statistic.
What the data says
Most Canadian business sales are private, negotiated transactions with no public registry, no standard closing-date disclosure requirement, and no single marketplace that captures more than a fraction of listings. Deavo's own market outlook piece, titled to promise a deal-count or timing index, states none on the page — which is itself informative: the organisation best positioned to publish a Canadian aggregate has looked and not found one to publish either.
Rather than an average, the useful planning tool is the set of real deadlines a specific deal triggers. A domestic asset sale under the CSBFP financing threshold might clear diligence and close inside the sector range Deavo describes. A cross-border share deal that is also notifiable under the Competition Act stacks the Investment Canada Act review clock on top of the merger notification waiting period, and those two alone can add three to four months before a single negotiating point is settled.
A share deal that triggers dissent rights adds its own sequence of statutory deadlines. Under CBCA s. 190, the corporation must give notice of dissent rights, respond within ten days of the resolution’s adoption, the shareholder has twenty days from that notice to demand payment, the corporation must deliver share certificates within thirty days of the demand, and it must then make a payment offer within seven days of the later of the transaction taking effect and receiving the demand — an offer that itself lapses if not accepted within thirty days. None of that is optional once dissent is triggered. A unanimous shareholder agreement adds a smaller but real trap for a purchaser: under CBCA s. 146(4), a purchaser of shares subject to a USA who was not given notice of it may rescind the transaction within thirty days of becoming aware the agreement exists.
For the financing step that often extends a domestic timeline, see guaranteed lending volume for small business buyers. For the regulatory clocks on a larger or cross-border deal, see Investment Canada Act filings and reviews and merger notifications and Competition Bureau outcomes.
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