Nine Pickleball Facilities Just Cut Their Asking Prices by 39% in 10 Weeks
- Nine pickleball facilities listed for sale on BizBuySell cut their asking prices by an average of 39 percent over the past 10 weeks, with one Florida club falling from $1.5 million to $600,000.
- Four listings from the same broker, spread across Florida, Maryland, Michigan and South Carolina, all launched at an identical $1.5 million before being repriced once financial data went public.
- The five-location Pickleball Academy group cut its asking price from $4.5 million to $2.15 million, the steepest dollar drop in the data set and the longest-running listing tracked.
The Pickleball Building Boom Just Met Its First Price Check
For two years, pickleball facility listings on BizBuySell followed the same script: an optimistic asking price, thin financial disclosure and long stretches sitting unsold. BizBuySell is one of the largest online marketplaces for buying and selling small businesses, and its pickleball category has become a rough gauge of how owners think their clubs are worth compared with what buyers are actually willing to pay. That script just changed. Over the past 10 weeks, nine pickleball facilities across the country listed for sale cut their asking prices, and the cuts were not small. The typical reduction was 39 percent, according to data tracked by the International Association of Pickleball and Padel Facilities.
Two of the nine dropped their price by more than half. One indoor club in Florida went from $1.5 million to $600,000 in a single move. Not one of the nine listings raised its price. For a category of business that spent two years posting hopeful numbers with little financial backup, a uniform move in one direction, down and only down, breaks from that two-year pattern.
David Johnson, CEO of the IAPPF and publisher of The Business of Pickleball, has spent two decades on the business side of the sport. He co-founded Pickleball Central in 2006, then Pickleball Station, one of the first indoor pickleball facilities in the country, before starting the IAPPF two years ago. A large part of his current work is watching where the industry is headed next, and BizBuySell listings are one of the clearest public windows into that. His team captured every listing on the marketplace in late June and checked each one again in early September, tracking whether asking prices moved and by how much.
“There’s clearly a reset underway for facility valuations,” Johnson wrote. He was careful to note the limits of the data: these are asking prices, not confirmed sale prices, so a lower ask does not mean a facility actually sold at that number. But when nine sellers move at once, he said, it tells you what buyers are willing to pay.
One Price, Four Buildings
The clearest example in the data involves four separate listings handled by the same broker. Earlier this year, indoor facilities in Florida, Maryland, Michigan and South Carolina all hit the market at exactly $1.5 million, four different buildings in four different markets carrying an identical number.
In late August, all four listings were renamed, repriced and, for the first time, posted alongside real financial disclosures. Once buyers could see the numbers, the prices landed where the numbers pointed: $600,000, $860,000, $915,000 and $1 million. A broker asking the same round number for four unrelated buildings was never a sign of what those buildings could earn. It was a placeholder, and the market treated it like one the moment real numbers arrived.
Multiple Locations Don’t Guarantee a Premium
Size hasn’t protected sellers either. The Pickleball Academy, a five-location group spread across Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, cut its price from $4.5 million to $2.15 million, a $2.35 million reduction. It has also been on the market longer than any other listing the IAPPF tracked, which undercuts the idea that owning several locations makes a group easier to sell.
Smaller operators are cutting too. An eight-court facility with a bar on Staten Island dropped from $699,000 to $399,000. A club in Harris County, Texas, fell from $150,000 to $95,000. The pattern holds from Florida to Minnesota and from single locations to multi-site groups: sellers across the board are resetting what they expect to walk away with.
What a Court Is Actually Worth
Johnson’s core point is simple: a facility is not worth what its owner spent building it. Buyers pay for earnings, typically a multiple of profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, not for the cost of walls, courts and lighting. “If your club isn’t producing strong, steady profit, you’ll struggle to find a buyer,” he wrote. “And the one you find will likely offer less than you put into the walls, courts and lighting.”
Location and lease terms carry similar force. A new owner can rework programming or adjust pricing, but they cannot move a building or rewrite a bad lease. A facility with a favorable lease in a strong location will likely still find a buyer, Johnson said, though that buyer is going to negotiate hard on price once the club’s real financials are on the table.
Not a Crash, But a Correction
Johnson pushed back on reading the price cuts as a sign the industry is collapsing. Some clubs will close, he said, the way small businesses always do. Roughly 20 percent of new small businesses fail within their first year, and pickleball and padel facilities are not close to that rate. What’s happening now, in his view, is the gap between what owners hoped to get and what buyers will actually pay finally closing.
For players, that correction has an upside. The clubs that make it through this reset will be the ones run as real businesses with real financials, not just concrete and paint. Those are the clubs built to stay open past the first lease renewal, and they are the ones likely to still have your name on a membership roster five years from now.
A Boom Still Sorting Itself Out
The price resets follow years of rapid construction that turned pickleball facilities from a novelty into a crowded market in cities across the country. Investors and first-time operators moved fast to grab locations and sign leases, and now the same market is sorting out which of those bets can support the numbers on paper. The four identically priced listings, the five-location group stuck on the market longer than any other, and the small operators cutting prices in half all point to the same underlying issue: a wave of facilities built or bought in the boom years is now running into buyers who want to see the earnings first. Johnson and the IAPPF plan to dig further into facility valuation at SMASH 2026, the IAPPF International Conference, Expo and Investment Summit in Orlando this November, alongside sessions on what it actually takes to run a facility profitably for the long haul.
For anyone eyeing a facility purchase, or already running one and wondering what it’s worth, the message from this data set is blunt: the buildout does not set the price. The bottom line does. Nine listings, tracked twice over 10 weeks by the same organization, just proved that in public, one repriced building at a time.
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