Is Your Cannabis Property Priced to Sell?

If you’re prepping to bring a cannabis asset to market, here’s the hard truth: simply plugging in your replacement cost and adding 20% won't get you on a buyer’s shortlist anymore. 2025’s cannabis real estate market has finally grown up, and buyers have gotten savvier because many have been burned before. If your price is tuned to yesterday’s headlines or some notion of a “green zone premium,” expect stale listings and disappointed clients. Here’s what actually moves the needle for sellers, investors, and brokers working with plant-touching assets in today’s fragmented, cash-strapped market.

What’s Your Asset Really Worth? Context Over Guesswork

Most cannabis property owners have seen early comps putting garden-variety industrial facilities at eye-watering premiums if they had so much as a CUP in application. Those days are over. Now, pricing is hyper-local and hyper-specific to the licenses, operator credit, build out status, and building characteristics combined. In 2025, price is less about cannabis and more about fundamentals. High-voltage power for an indoor grow? A necessity, not a bonus. Turnkey with all licenses and permits in place? Premium territory. Non-conforming use, shoddy HVAC retrofit, or a makeshift security system? You’re entering commodity land, or worse - the discount bin.

Here’s where deals go sideways fast:

• Listing at a price that exceeds replacement value when there’s inventory flooding in from auctions and distressed sales.
• Basing comps on last year’s prices, not the latest round of cannabis asset fire sales or lender takebacks.
• Ignoring zoning, buildout, and license transfer risks, especially when selling pre-operational assets.
• Overestimating demand for highly-specialized buildouts (100,000 sq ft grow with triple stacked bloom rooms… impressive, sure, but which MSO wants it here and now?).

2025 Opportunity: Demand Where Regulatory Risk Is Low, Transferability Is Clear, and Fundamentals are Met

Here’s the bright spot: Properties in “sticky” license environments—where ownership transfers are allowed, new permits are capped, and barriers to entry are high—are holding value. Dispensaries in walkable retail clusters (not aging strip malls next to vape outlets) still see competitive offers if everyone’s homework is done. Retail is about visibility and accessibility, so dispensary properties on hard corners and those with large signage are in high demand.

For industrial properties zoned for cultivation and manufacturing, prices are holding for assets that:

• Have sufficient three-phase power or a clear path to a power upgrade (including cost and accurate lead times for equipment and servicing)
• Show clean environmental histories, with “no further action” letters filed and verifiable remediation.
• Are turnkey or have approved plans accompanied by a realistic budget and timeline to commence operations.
• Include defensible projections for each planned phase of operations.

Action Steps: How to Nail Pricing (and Actually Get to the Closing Table)

Cannabis buyers in 2025 are more research-driven than ever before and expect a data room full of due diligence information— zoning approval letters, operating permits, copies of applications and leases, market projections, and more at their fingertips. This isn’t the part where I tell you to “consult a professional”—you already know that. Here’s where you get proactive:

1. Get Real Data, Not Just Broker Hype: Pull relevant comps from the past 12 months, not press-release headlines about “highest ever” sales in a market. Comps should be in the same jurisdiction with the same license types. Get an appraisal from a reputable firm that uses multiple valuation methodologies to reach a comprehensive and informed price opinion.
2. Be Ready to Defend Every Line of Your Pro Forma:  Buyers aren’t just looking at NOI anymore; they’re drilling into whether that power bill is sustainable, if taxes have been appropriately estimated, and if the tenant’s financials are clean and verifiable. Assumptions for market projections should be realistic and based on historical data from similar markets (ex. wholesale price per lb estimates should not increase over time…) Scrub, verify, document.
3. Reality-Check Your Transferability & Risk: Map out every step, permit, and approval that will be required to transfer ownership of your licensed property to a new buyer. Not understanding the closing mechanics and timeline is a rookie move. If you don’t have a clear road to transferability, price your asset with a risk discount, not a speculative premium.
4. Know Your Buyer Pool: Understand which types of buyers your asset will appeal to. A fully-leased dispensary property would be attractive to family office and private equity buyers that want stabilized cash flows. A fully permitted industrial building would be attractive to developers looking for early market entry. A distressed grow operation would be attractive to cannabis companies looking for discounted deals. Know your buyer, then set terms and pricing accordingly.
5. To Find a Good Buyer, You Have to Be a Good Seller: Selling at top of market is everyone’s goal, but in today’s cut-throat environment, you have to leave some upside for whoever is stepping into your deal. Be ready to show that your asking price still leaves meat on the bone for the buyer. Less cash in the market has led to more creativity in deal structure, so be prepared for earn outs and seller notes to enter the discussion too.

One last thing:

The CannaMLS crowd knows when a listing is real and when it’s just noise. Our users on both the buy-side and the sell-side look for proper documentation and up-to-date comps, and they’ll call out wishful thinking faster than a city planner at a permit hearing. That level of transparency isn’t just nice to have; it’s the difference between a fast, full-price close and a listing that gets quietly passed over. Bottom line? The buyers who are still active in cannabis real estate are doing their homework. Make sure your price is rooted in hard evidence, local nuance, and today’s deal flow. If you want your asset to move, realistic pricing is the sharpest tool in your drawer.

—Jade Green, CEO of CannaMLS

If you’re about to list and have questions about your asking price, recent transaction data, or tips on how to maximize your listing visibility, you know where to find us!