How LicenseComps sources its numbers

Where the data comes from

We combine several public records of California liquor-license transfers:

• CA ABC daily data export — the state's full daily license file, captured every business day and diffed to detect ownership changes and in-flight transfers. ABC publishes no history, so this accumulating record is unique to us.
• §24074 bulk-sale notices — statutory escrow notices published when a business and its license change hands, which sometimes state the consideration.
• Published broker and trade sale records — realized sale prices reported publicly, used to seed and cross-check county coverage.

Arizona DLLC Fair Market Values

For Arizona, the regulator itself publishes the comp anchor. A.R.S. §4-206.01 and rule A.A.C. R19-1-204 direct the Department of Liquor Licenses and Control to compute, before each lottery, the "Fair Market Value" for each quota license series (Series 6 Bar, Series 7 Beer & Wine Bar, Series 9 Liquor Store) in each county — defined by statute as the mean value of licenses of the same type sold on the open market in the same county during the prior twelve months. Each (year, county, series) cell on our Arizona page is one such regulator-stamped county-mean comp, sourced from the DLLC's annual FMV PDFs.

Pennsylvania PLCB auction hammer prices

For Pennsylvania, the Liquor Control Board's Act-39 expired-restaurant-license auctions are public sales with published hammer prices and auction averages. We capture the per-auction high, low, and statewide average from the PLCB's press-release PDFs.

What we publish

Public pages show aggregate statistics only — count, low, median, average, and high — and only for a county or license type once we have at least 3 realized sales on file. Individual transactions are not published publicly; slices with fewer than 3 sales are withheld until coverage is sufficient.

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