I feel like your question answers itself, a site that generates no income before it is sold doesn't really have any value to be completely honest. If the site is ranking, and generating leads, then it has an intrinsic value of potential income. I feel it is a gamble and as Ben said "[it] is worth what they buyer will pay for it."
I suppose, if you have qualified leads being generated, you could place a market value on each lead with a realistic conversion rate factored in to get a base sale value. Once you have a base, you could project what it is worth to a company that can build a reputation and stronger business with it.
Using the above example of 500 visitors, 5% to leads, and a 1.5% conversion rate (lets be realistic now) works out to 1 client. So for this venture to be profitiable, you would probably need to generate at least 1000 * 5000 visitors a month, and hope for 5-10 clients. Now if a business buys this and makes it successful, the conversion rate should increase due to reputation. You could build a projected sale price of the 1-2 year projection.
That all being said, you really will need to have a decent amount of traffic coming to the site in order for it to be salable, or follow the old adage 'a sucker is born every minute' and swindle someone into buying based on promised traffic and revenue that is in fact not there (not recommend: very unprofessional and possibly reputation damaging.)
-- edit --
- clearly my math was wrong, it should be 5000 visitors for 5-10 clients, not 1000.