Does owning my building change how a buyer values the operating business inside it?

Yes, and it's important to separate the two in your own mind before you talk to a buyer. Most buyers will value the operating business — its earnings, contracts, and customer relationships — separately from the real estate it happens to occupy, even though you own both. The building itself is typically valued on its own terms, closer to a commercial real estate valuation, while the business is valued based on its own earnings and risk profile.

The nuance is deciding, before you go to market, whether you're selling the building along with the business, keeping the building and leasing it to the new owner, or selling the two separately to potentially different buyers entirely. Each path changes both the structure of the deal and your own ongoing involvement — a lease-back arrangement, for instance, keeps you connected to the buyer as their landlord long after the sale of the business itself closes.

Because combining a business sale with a real property transaction adds real estate law, land transfer tax, and financing considerations that most buyers of the operating business alone wouldn't face, it's worth having a business lawyer help you think through which structure actually fits your goals before you decide how to present the sale.