What's up with all the private listings on Baton Market?
March 20, 2025
by a searcher from INSEAD in San Francisco, CA, USA
One of the sites I commonly check for brokered deals is Baton: https://www.batonmarket.com/ They have deals I don't see listed elsewhere and their data room (and overall deal presentation) seems to be pretty slick.
However, I've recently ran into some issues with their "private" listings (supposedly off-market deal where the owner is accepting offers on a case-by-case basis). At least in CA, there are way more private listings than public ones (~80/100). I've tried to message the seller on a couple of them with no luck. The site used to be mostly public listings with a few private listings sprinkled in, but seemingly overnight there were an enormous amount of private deals added. I'm skeptical (paranoid me questions if they are they even real listings) and have gone so far as to remove private listings from my searches on Baton.
Has anyone here had success with private listings?
from Syracuse University in Manhattan, New York, NY, USA
Private Listings are businesses whose owner has gotten a free valuation with us and are not ready to enter into a full sale process but are open to (or mildly interested in) seeing how buyers might engage with their business if it was listed at a certain price.
We launched this because there are a lot of owners who did not want to actively sell but could be pulled into a process if they are getting engagement. On the flip side, we want to give you all (buyers) access to real off-market deals where it's more likely that the owner actually sees your outreach, can view information about you, and decide if they want to respond. While it helps build the listing value of the marketplace, that's not really a focus for us since we only really make money when we actually sell a business -- we charge a retainer too but it's more of a nuisance fee to assure the sellers actually engage.
In the background, after you submit interest, we add your message to the owner's dashboard for them to see and view key details on you and then our sales team reaches out to the owner to see if they want to engage. If they decide to engage, you'll essentially get a first pass and we run a tight process to support you in closing the deal.
The conversion from getting engagement on a private listing to deciding to actively list a business is a bit above 10% so theoretically if you engage with 10 listings, one of them should engage in a sale process but of course it's not always true.
One of the issues on the low engagement that y'all are experiencing and the feeling of being left in the dark is because having a private listing is free and the owner has to start paying a retainer to engage in a sale. We might need another plan for owners who just want to engage with a singular buyer (although most owners either want to go all in on a sale or they don't) or provide the owner a way to kindly decline engagement and pass that feedback on to you as the buyer. We also don't have a great way for you to manage all of the engagement in one place which I think contributes to the feeling of uncertainty. All things we're thinking about and working on!
I hope this is helpful but please keep questions and feedback coming our way -- any thoughts on how to explain Private Listings in the product, improve the product, or just thoughts in general are welcome. So grateful that it sounds like all of you are using Baton as part of your searching stack. My email is redacted if anyone ever wants to connect.
Also, my co-founder wrote an article on Private Listings here: https://www.batonmarket.com/baton-beat/introducing-private-listings-the-future-of-off-market-business-connections
from INSEAD in San Francisco, CA, USA
Totally get your perspective, its a no-risk way to incentivize potential sellers. If you are open to feedback, I do think there are a couple of ways to potentially improve these listings:
1. Include some sort of stats around how often a private listing is viewed, how often messages are sent, number of owner replies - maybe just mash it all together into a tag that we as buyers can see like "hot", "warm", or "cold". That way we are incentivized to reach out to good listings and sellers are incentivized to engage with us to drive traffic to their listings.
2. Building on my first point, maybe have some way to default show only private listings where the seller is active as defined by # of replies, last time online, etc...so that the feed isn't as clogged up with sellers who are just tire-kickers.
Understand that this could potentially drive a negative feedback loop where only the most interested/engaged sellers are getting inquiries, but IMO quality > quantity.