Buy box

Definition

The written criteria a buyer screens deals against: size, trade, geography.

Why It Matters

Every aggregator sells buy-box matching and every broker asks what yours is, so the phrase is the industry's word for the thesis you screen against. Writing it down is what keeps a pipeline honest: after months of searching, an unwritten box drifts toward whatever the inbox happens to hold. Keep it to lines a listing can pass or fail, size band, trade, geography, owner involvement, and revisit it deliberately when twenty deals in a row fail the same line, because that is evidence about the market rather than about your discipline.

In numbers: A buy box reading $500k to $1.2M SDE, home services, within 90 minutes of home screens out a $300k SDE listing before the CIM costs a week.