M&A activity snapshot
Home services is in a late, platform-to-platform stage of consolidation. Private-equity investors purchased nearly 800 HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies from 2022 to October 2024, according to PitchBook data reported by the Wall Street Journal. No public source publishes a verified deal count across all residential trades, so the most reliable current data comes trade by trade.
HVAC services is the best tracked. Capstone Partners counted 92 HVAC services transactions in 2026 through July, down 4.2% year over year, with sponsors behind 47. In pest control, Rollins completed 94 acquisitions over three years, including 26 in 2025.
The largest platforms now trade between major sponsors. Apollo funds agreed in May 2026 to take a minority stake in Apex Service Partners, which operates 75 local brands across 46 states. Blackstone agreed in February 2026 to acquire Champions Group from Odyssey Investment Partners, and Goldman Sachs Alternatives agreed in 2024 to buy a majority stake in Sila Services from Morgan Stanley Capital Partners.
Who is buying
Buyers fall into five groups, each with a different entry size and thesis.
- Multi-trade residential platforms. Apex, Wrench and Sila each combine HVAC, plumbing and electrical. The Wrench Group has been majority-owned by Leonard Green since 2019, with TSG Consumer Partners and Oak Hill adding a significant minority investment in 2022. They buy established local brands and keep the local name.
- Franchise systems and their large operators. KKR agreed in 2021 to acquire Neighborly, then a franchisor of 28 brands and more than 4,800 franchises. Apax-backed Authority Brands, also a home services franchisor, issued its third whole-business securitization in May 2026. Franchise operators also consolidate: Reliable Residential, the largest operator within the Neighborly system, acquired ACG Smith Texas in December 2025.
- Public strategics. Rollins in pest control is the clearest example of a listed company that buys continuously.
- Independent sponsors and search funds. They buy single-market businesses below platform thresholds, often as the first acquisition of a new platform.
- Commercial-focused platforms. In HVAC, the most active named acquirers in PKF O'Dwyer's H1 2026 deal list skew toward commercial mechanical and manufacturers'-rep businesses, a different buyer set from residential platforms.
What buyers look for
The core thesis is recurring, non-discretionary service revenue in a fragmented market. Rollins' own filing describes a highly competitive environment with fragmented markets and low barriers to entry, which is what makes buy-and-build possible across most residential trades.
Buyers price predictable service ahead of project work. PKF O'Dwyer notes that predictable preventative service work, especially if contractually locked in over multiple years, is seen more favorably than lumpy project work. Membership programs are the residential version of that contract: Champions Group reported 150,000 active members at the time of the Blackstone deal.
Trade-specific risks come next. The same PKF O'Dwyer report lists owner dependency, license-holder risk and key-man risk among valuation factors. In licensed trades, the owner often holds the license the business operates under, so buyers need a successor license holder in place before close.
What makes a strong company
Across trades, the businesses that draw platform-level interest usually show:
- Recurring revenue from memberships, maintenance agreements or route-based contracts, tracked by renewal rate.
- A field team, dispatcher and general manager who run daily operations without the owner.
- Licenses held by more than one person, and clean records with the state board.
- Route density in a defined metro, rather than scattered jobs across a wide area.
- Low customer concentration, especially to a single builder, property manager or insurer.
- Monthly financials that separate service, install and project revenue.
Valuation and deal structure
Multiples vary by trade, size and revenue quality, and published data is uneven. HVAC services averaged 9.5x EV/EBITDA between 2024 and YTD 2026, down from 13.3x in 2021-2023. For the smaller deals typical of owner-operators, the closest public benchmark is all-industry: GF Data reported business services multiples averaging 6.2x EBITDA in H1 2025, and $1M-$5M transactions averaging 5.5x. Treat those as proxies, not home-services figures.
Size moves price. The WSJ report describes Redwood Services buying smaller outfits outright for an average of $1 million and taking majority stakes in larger companies with an average valuation around $20 million.
Rollover equity is common in platform deals. Sila management retained a significant minority stake in the Goldman Sachs deal, and Odyssey and management kept a significant minority investment alongside Blackstone in Champions Group. No public dataset reports earnout or rollover rates for home services, so those terms are negotiated case by case.
Subindustries
Each trade has its own buyers, license rules and revenue model. HVAC, plumbing and electrical share an NAICS group — 238220 covers plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors — and often the same platforms; the route-based trades below them run on different economics.