Last year we published a post about which MSO’s bought or built their stores and for this week’s analysis we wanted to explore the prices paid for purchased locations. To do this we researched the 600+ M&A transactions we have compiled in our Cannabiz Business Intelligence offering and removed any stores that were part of a deal where other license types were also sold. That left 170 stores sold in sixteen states. We included both closed and announced deals but ignored those deals that were cancelled. 

Key Findings

• Pennsylvania led the nation with the highest price paid for stores in store-only deals
• 2021 was the biggest year for these transactions with 46% of the 170 changing hands
• 2021 was also the year with the highest price point at $13.46 million
• California led the country with 22 of these transactions, with Pennsylvania right behind at 21

Leaderboard

We found deals ranging in price from $36.77M down to $216K. Here are the top 12 prices paid, along with the date and state:

To no one’s surprise, all of those deals happened between 2019 and 2021 when capital was available. Here are the store deals by year and average price paid in that year:

States

California, Pennsylvania and Colorado were at the top of the leaderboard with Maryland and Ohio not too far behind.  

And here are the average prices paid in those sixteen states. Not surprising there is a wide range of prices owing to different market dynamics as well as different points in time when these acquisitions occurred.

Conclusion

This post looks at 170 select transactions where only retailers/dispensaries were involved in the transaction. This was done to allow us to see the price point for these types of businesses, without having to back out manufacturing and cultivation asset prices. 2021 was the high point in terms of the number of stores sold and the price point. Numbers dropped in 2022 and 2023 looks like it might match 2022 in terms of deals. The price in 2023 is up $1.2 million but that is likely impacted by the states where the deals have been done.

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Want more? Check out Part 2!

Author

Ed Keating is a co-founder of Cannabiz Media and oversees the company’s data research and government relations efforts. He has spent his career working with and advising information companies in the compliance space. Ed has managed product, marketing, and sales while overseeing complex multi-jurisdictional product lines in the securities, corporate, UCC, safety, environmental, and human resource markets.  

At Cannabiz Media, Ed enjoys the challenge of working with regulators across the globe as he and his team gather corporate, financial, and license information to track the people, products, and businesses in the cannabis economy.  

Ed graduated from Hamilton College and received his MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.

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