Every hotel sale comes down to one question: how much profit stays with the hotel, and how much of it leaves with the owner?

Sellers always claim the profits will continue without them. Buyers want to know why they should believe that claim. The space between those perspectives can move the price by tens of millions of dollars.

In most hotels, some of the profits are permanent, regardless of who owns the place. The location, the views, and the building are still there after the deed changes hands. Those things can keep driving revenue and profit long after the seller is gone.

But then there’s the owner, and sometimes a good deal of the profit may be tied to her. Maybe she knows every important guest, or she can smell a bad hire in five minutes. Possibly she watches every dollar, and has spent 30 years building relationships nobody else has. Take her away and see what happens to the numbers.

Before any transaction can happen, the buyer needs to understand exactly where the hotel’s profits come from. If too much of the its success depends on the owner, some of the profit is leaving when she does.

And that can cost a fortune. If a buyer pays a fat multiple for profits that disappear after closing, they’ve just paid the seller for money they’ll never make.

What it comes down to is this: Sellers have to prove the profits don’t depend on them. If the hotel makes the same money when they’re sitting on a beach 5,000 miles away, then prove that to the buyer.

That proof can be worth tens of millions. Show the buyer a business that keeps making money without the owner in the room, and you’ve taken away one very good reason to knock down the price.

Buyers want to know what they’re buying, and sellers want to get paid for what they’ve built. In the end, the price comes down to how much money is still there after the old owner walks out the door.