PARA VENDEDORES
Why Private Equity Is Buying Every HVAC and Plumbing Company It Can Find
Private equity add-ons made up roughly 41% of all HVAC M&A activity in 2026
That isn't opportunistic buying — it's a strategy. Here's the math behind the roll-up, and what it means for your number.
If you own an HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or pest control business of any real size, there’s a good chance a private-equity-backed platform has already looked at you. Maybe you’ve had the call. Maybe you got the letter that says “we’re not brokers, we’re buyers” and threw it out.
Most owners read those approaches as flattery, or as noise. They’re neither. They’re the visible edge of a systematic acquisition campaign that has been running in home services for years — and understanding the machinery behind it changes how you should read the first offer that lands in your inbox.
I. What's Actually Happening in Your Industry
This isn’t a vague trend. It’s measurable.
Industry M&A tracking for HVAC services counted 92 announced or completed transactions year-to-date in 2026, down about 4% from the prior year, so activity is steady rather than frothy. What matters is the composition. Financial sponsors accounted for 47 of those deals. Of those, 38 were add-ons to platforms that already existed, and only 9 were new platform creations.
That means roughly 41% of all deal activity in the sector was one thing: existing platforms bolting on more companies. Strategic buyers took most of the rest — and many of those strategics are themselves consolidators.
The platforms doing the buying are named, funded, and easy to look up: Sila Services (Goldman Sachs Alternatives), Apex Service Partners (Alpine Investors), Wrench Group (Leonard Green & Partners), Champions Group (Blackstone), Service Logic (Bain Capital), Neighborly (KKR), Ambient Enterprises (Intermediate Capital Group), PremiStar (Partners Group). One industry tracker identified 21 separate active platforms with publicly disclosed plumbing acquisitions between January 2024 and April 2026 alone.
II. La matemática: el arbitraje de múltiplos en palabras sencillas
Here’s the part most owners are never told directly.
A platform isn’t buying your company because it wants to run an HVAC business in your city. It’s buying your company because a dollar of your EBITDA is worth more inside a large platform than it is inside your company, instantly, before anyone improves a single operation.
Industry benchmarking puts owner-operated HVAC businesses under roughly $1M of EBITDA in the 3x to 4.5x range. At the other end, well-run HVAC businesses at real scale have reached 9x to 10x and above in competitive processes, and transaction data across HVAC deals from 2024 through mid-2026 shows an average of about 9.5x EV/EBITDA.
Run the arithmetic on a business doing $500,000 in EBITDA:
- Acquired as a bolt-on at 4x: $2.0 million
- That same $500,000 sitting inside a platform valued at 9x: $4.5 million
The $2.5 million difference didn’t come from better operations. It came from the earnings changing address. That’s multiple arbitrage, and it’s the engine of the entire strategy. Everything after it — shared purchasing, consolidated back office, pricing discipline, cross-selling maintenance plans — is upside layered on top of a gain that was locked in at signing.
| Trade | Typical small owner-operator range | Larger / platform-scale range |
|---|---|---|
| HVAC | ~3.0x – 4.5x EBITDA | 9x – 10x+ on premium assets |
| Plomería | ~2.4x – 3.5x (sub-$500K EBITDA) | ~5x – 6.5x at the upper end |
| Eléctrico | ~3.2x at the low end | ~7x – 8x |
| Pest control | ~4.0x – 4.75x (small residential) | ~7.5x – 8.5x+ (commercial-heavy) |
| Roofing | ~2.5x at the low end | ~7x |
Ranges reflect published industry benchmarking for 2026 and vary widely with recurring revenue mix, customer type, and how prepared the seller is. They are not a quote on any specific business.
III. Why Home Services, and Why Now
Consolidators aren’t picking these trades at random. Home services has an unusual combination of traits that make roll-ups work:
- Demand that doesn’t ask permission. A failed air conditioner in South Florida in August is not a discretionary purchase. Recent buyer surveys found roughly 86% of small-business buyers actively screening for recession-resistant operations — this sector is the textbook answer.
- Recurring revenue hiding in plain sight. Maintenance agreements and service plans convert transactional work into contracted work, which is valued on a completely different scale than one-off installs.
- Fragmentación extrema. Thousands of independent operators, most under $5M in revenue, many owned by someone within a decade of retirement. That’s a long runway of targets.
- No brand risk in buying. Platforms usually keep the local name, the trucks, and the phone number. The customer never notices, which means acquired revenue holds up after closing.
IV. What This Actually Means for You
None of this makes a platform a bad buyer. Platforms close, they’re professional, they don’t need SBA approval, and they can pay cash at levels an individual buyer often can’t. Plenty of owners have done very well selling into one.
But three things follow from the mechanics above, and they should change how you handle the call.
A single-buyer conversation is not a market test. If one platform approaches you directly and you negotiate only with them, you don’t know whether their number is good. You know only that it was acceptable to them. The reason buyers prefer proprietary, off-market deals is that off-market deals price lower than competitive ones.
Your multiple is driven by your readiness as much as your industry. Industry benchmarking suggests the spread between a well-prepared and an unprepared seller in the same trade and size band routinely runs 2.0x to 3.5x EBITDA — a wider gap than the one between trades.
You have three honest options, not one.
- Sell now, into the consolidation. Take advantage of an active buyer pool while it’s active — but run a process, not a conversation.
- Build for 18–36 months, then sell. Move up a size band, raise your recurring revenue mix, get off the owner-dependency treadmill. The multiple curve is steep enough that this can pay more than growth alone.
- Hold and compete. Legitimate, but go in clear-eyed: consolidated competitors will have deeper marketing budgets, better vendor pricing, and more aggressive technician recruiting.
V. Questions Worth Asking When a Platform Calls
Before you talk numbers, know what you’re actually being offered:
- Is this an offer, an indication of interest, or a conversation? They are very different things.
- What multiple, applied to which earnings definition — SDE or EBITDA — and which of my add-backs are you accepting?
- How much of the price is cash at close versus rollover equity versus earnout?
- If there’s rollover equity, whose exit does my second payday depend on, and when do they expect it?
- Am I required to stay after closing? For how long, in what role, at what compensation?
- What happens to my team, my brand, and my vendor relationships?
- Are you talking to other companies in my market right now?
That rollover equity question deserves particular attention. Rolling a portion of your proceeds into platform equity can be genuinely lucrative — the “second bite of the apple” is real. But it also means a meaningful part of your retirement depends on someone else’s exit timing, someone else’s leverage, and someone else’s operating decisions. It’s an investment, not a payment, and it should be evaluated as one.
Conclusion: Know Which Side of the Arbitrage You're On
The consolidation happening in home services isn’t a threat and it isn’t a gift. It’s a market condition — a large, well-capitalized, unusually organized pool of buyers with a specific, quantifiable reason to want what you own.
The owners who do poorly in this environment aren’t the ones who sell to platforms. They’re the ones who sell to a platform without ever finding out what anyone else would have paid.
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