How long does it actually take to sell a commercial building?

Short answer: six to nine months from listing to close for a straightforward asset that is priced correctly. Two to four months of that is marketing and offer. Two to three is escrow and diligence. The rest is the gap between when a seller decides to sell and when the property is actually ready to be seen, which is the part nobody counts and the part that varies most.

The number is less useful than knowing where the months go, because only some of them are yours to change.

Where the time actually goes

Preparation, 2 to 6 weeks.Rent roll, trailing financials, service contracts, photos, flyer. This is entirely within the seller’s control and it is where the most time gets quietly lost, usually waiting on a document from a property manager.

Marketing to first credible offer, 4 to 12 weeks. The real variable. A well-known asset in a hot submarket can draw an offer in a fortnight. Something that needs explaining takes longer, and the quality of the package decides how much longer.

Negotiation to signed PSA, 2 to 4 weeks. Mostly a function of how many parties are involved and how prepared the buyer is.

Diligence and escrow, 8 to 12 weeks. Inspection, environmental, title, survey, financing. This clock runs at its own speed and marketing has no effect on it. Assume it will not compress.

It varies more by asset class than by market

Single-tenant net lease. Fastest, because the underwriting is nearly arithmetic. Credit tenant, years remaining, rent bumps. A buyer can price it without visiting.

Multifamily and industrial. Middle. Deep buyer pools and familiar underwriting, but condition and rent roll quality matter, so buyers want to see more before committing.

Multi-tenant office and retail. Slower. Rollover, TI obligations, and tenant credit all have to be priced by each buyer individually, and every unresolved question adds a week.

Land and anything entitlement-dependent. Slowest and least predictable. The timeline belongs to a municipality, not to you.

The part sellers control, and usually do not use

Preparation and time-to-first-offer are the only two windows a seller genuinely influences. Together they are frequently half the calendar.

Most listings lose weeks in the same way. A buyer opens the package, cannot tell what the property looks like from four photos, cannot see how the site sits without opening a map, and has to email for the rent roll. Each of those is a small friction, and a buyer with twelve listings open does not push through friction, they close the tab.

Anything that answers more of those questions in the first thirty seconds pulls the first credible offer earlier. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why a video tends to help more on a complicated asset than on a simple one: the simple one was already legible on a spreadsheet.

When the listing goes quiet

At some point inquiries stop. Read the pattern before reacting. If you received serious inquiries that went nowhere on price, that is a price signal. If you received few inquiries at all, that is a reach and packaging signal, and cutting the price does not fix it. It just sells the building for less to the same small audience.

Refreshing the package is the reversible move and a price cut is not. On Slungshots that refresh is $10 per second one-time, or 50 seconds a month at $199 on Pro with 36-hour delivery, built from the photos and flyer the listing already has.

A realistic plan

Budget nine months and work to shorten the front half. Have the documents assembled before the listing goes live rather than during. Put the property in a form a buyer can understand without asking. Then let diligence take the time diligence takes. For what to do during those first weeks, see the marketing sequence.