Recruiters wishing to sell distressed companies are scuppering their chances of a sale by refusing to lower the price.

Tim Evans, a director of Catalyst Corporate Finance, told Recruiter: “Some distressed vendors are refusing to be flexible on valuation in spite of their business’s obvious distress. The summer trading down period for recruitment will be a crunch point for many of thesemergers and acquisitions market.”

Evans also warned that buyers needed to move quickly as there was a short window of opportunity between when a target business became distressed, and the point of no return for that business.

Many buyers are missing out, said Evans, because they are taking too long to do due diligence, to get bank funding and because they lacked experience of doing deals.

Evans said that because of these problems the number of ‘distressed’ deals was not matching his expectations.