The 2026 HVAC, Refrigeration & Cooling Business Valuation & EBITDA Multiples Guide

Joe Lewin · Founder, DealFlowAgent · LinkedIn Published July 15, 2026 · Deal tables and regulatory calendar refreshed quarterly. Next scheduled review: October 2026.

HVAC, refrigeration and cooling is being consolidated faster than almost any other trade, and the record is public. In the UK, Nordic Climate Group entered the market in November 2025 and has since completed more than ten refrigeration and air conditioning acquisitions across Britain and Ireland, roughly one a month, backed by Altor Fund V. Triton Partners formed Tendra Technical Services in December 2025 from three building services businesses with £77.3M of combined turnover, and took a dedicated debt facility from Crescent Capital in April 2026 to fund further acquisitions. OCS, backed by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, paid £190M for EMCOR UK, and Sureserve paid £56.4M in cash for Kinovo. In the US the numbers are larger still: Blackstone agreed roughly $2.5bn for Champions Group at about 18.5x EBITDA, Apollo invested ~$2bn into Apex Service Partners at a reported $10bn valuation after Apex closed around 60 acquisitions in 2025 alone, Bain Capital and Mubadala bought Service Logic, a commercial HVAC service network of 140+ locations with $2.2bn of 2024 revenue, and Ecolab paid $4.75bn for data centre cooling specialist CoolIT.

What that competition pays. Prepared, professionally represented UK HVAC and refrigeration businesses with £1M+ of defended EBITDA are transacting between roughly 5x and 8x. Platform-grade groups above £3M of EBITDA reach 7x to 9.5x, and the largest prints, and the US market generally, sit higher still. Below £1M of earnings the ranges step down band by band, and at every size the same EBITDA can be priced more than a full turn apart depending on revenue mix, contract quality and how the business is taken to market. That is where this page earns its keep: the full size ladder, the 30 factors buyers score, every verified 2025-2026 transaction with a clickable source, and the regulatory calendar underwriting demand, from the F-Gas quota step-down on 1 January 2027 to the new 2031 EPC B requirement for large commercial lets. Where the evidence is thin we say so, and figures that are our own house view are labelled DealFlowAgent data.

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Contents

1. Why two businesses with the same EBITDA sell for very different prices
2. What is an HVAC or refrigeration business worth in 2026? The master table
3. How HVAC and refrigeration businesses are actually valued
4. The size ladder, band by band
5. The 30 factors that set your multiple
6. Two worked examples, with the arithmetic shown
7. 2025-2026 transaction evidence: UK
8. 2025-2026 transaction evidence: US
9. 2026 demand drivers and the consolidation map
10. What kills the multiple
11. Deal structure by size: headline price versus cash at close
12. UK versus US: what actually differs
13. FAQ
14. Glossary
15. Methodology and sources

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Why two businesses with the same EBITDA sell for very different prices

Before any table of multiples, the point most owners miss. Take two businesses in this trade, each showing £600K of EBITDA. The first earns it installing air conditioning for householders and small commercial fit-outs: one-off jobs, quoted competitively, revenue re-won from zero every January, and a quiet phone whenever a mild summer follows a mild winter. The second earns the same £600K from planned preventative maintenance contracts across supermarket refrigeration estates, commercial kitchens, offices and a cold storage operator: multi-year indexed agreements, statutory F-Gas leak checks that must happen on a fixed calendar whether or not anyone feels like spending, 24/7 callout cover priced into the contract, and churn measured in single digits because a food retailer does not casually re-tender the contractor who keeps its stock from spoiling. The first will struggle to clear 4x. The second can defend 6x or better, and the consolidators in the deal tables below will compete for it. Same EBITDA, roughly £1.2M apart, and every pound of the difference is explained by things the owner can influence.

Throughout this page we keep three revenue mixes separate, because buyers price them on different evidence: commercial service and maintenance (contracted PPM, the premium asset), installation and project work (priced lower because it must be re-won), and domestic and residential services (a different buyer universe entirely, priced on different data, and labelled as such wherever it appears).

Five moves that raise the multiple before you sell. These are the highest-yield preparation actions we see, each covered in depth further down: (1) convert habitual repeat customers onto signed, indexed PPM agreements, because the same revenue is worth materially more with a contract behind it; (2) get your F-Gas records, leak-check logs and refrigerant inventory audit-clean, because gaps here are priced as risk across the whole business; (3) measure maintenance-contract attrition and engineer utilisation, because unmeasured metrics get priced pessimistically; (4) build and evidence a second management tier, including a qualified supervisor who can hold the on-call rota, so consideration stays as completion cash instead of drifting into earn-outs; (5) have your EBITDA bridge defended to quality-of-earnings standard before the first buyer conversation, not during it. None of these requires new customers. Together they are routinely worth more than a year of trading growth.

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What is an HVAC or refrigeration business worth in 2026? The master table

The ladder below is banded by defended EBITDA, because that is the number buyers price (owner-operated businesses below roughly £250K of earnings are the exception, priced on SDE, covered in the note beneath the table). Ranges are the DealFlowAgent tier view, calibrated against the published evidence cited in each band's subsection and the 2025-2026 transactions in the deal tables; no public source publishes UK HVAC multiples by size band, so treat this as calibrated judgement anchored to the sources shown, not a price list. The lower bound of each range describes an unprepared, install-weighted business sold without competition; the upper bound describes a prepared, professionally represented one with strong contracted service revenue. The factor framework is what moves a business between the two.

**Indicative revenue assumes the roughly 8-15% EBITDA margins we see in service-led UK HVAC and refrigeration businesses at each size (DealFlowAgent estimate from mandate work and filed UK accounts; no public source publishes UK HVAC margins by turnover band). For calibration from public filings: EMCOR's UK building services division ran a 4.4% operating margin in FY2025 at very large scale, US specialty trades averaged 8.8% EBITDA in CFMA's 2025 benchmarking, and well-run US residential platforms report net margins rising from 5-10% at ~$2M revenue to 18-25% at $20M+ (residential data, labelled as such). Multiple ranges: DealFlowAgent tier view calibrated against the sources cited per band below and the linked 2025-2026 deal tables.

Below £250K of earnings: owner-operated businesses are priced on SDE rather than EBITDA, typically at 2.0x-3.0x depending on how much of the trading genuinely transfers without the owner. The published benchmarks at this size are US and residential-weighted (BizBuySell's 562 sold HVAC businesses median 2.58x SDE; IBBA Market Pulse Q4 2025 puts sub-$500K deals at 2.0x SDE) and should be read as floors, not commercial-service pricing. We advise at this size too, and the size ladder covers it honestly, including the fastest routes up: signed maintenance agreements and a second F-Gas certificated engineer.

See what these ranges mean for your business. Use the free calculator to get a live valuation range using the same 2026 sector evidence discussed on this page. 60 seconds. Calculate my valuation

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How HVAC and refrigeration businesses are actually valued

Defended EBITDA, not claimed EBITDA

Every valuation conversation in this trade starts from the same equation: enterprise value equals adjusted EBITDA multiplied by a multiple. What most owners underestimate is that both numbers are contested, and the first one is contested line by line.

Adjusted EBITDA starts from reported profit and adds back costs that will not continue under new ownership: the owner's above-market salary, personal vehicles, one-off legal or property costs. Buyers do not take that schedule on trust. Any serious acquirer, and every PE-backed one, runs a quality of earnings (QoE) review whose job is to disprove your adjustments. The number that survives that review is what we call defended EBITDA, and it is the number that gets priced. Buyer-side advisers report that the large majority of middle-market HVAC deals see post-diligence price adjustments, typically 5-15% of EBITDA (US adviser commentary, April 2026).

Two disputes recur in this trade specifically. The first is deferred maintenance revenue: if customers pay annually in advance for PPM agreements, part of that cash is a liability for work not yet delivered, and buyers will either treat it as debt-like or demand a working capital adjustment; agree the treatment in the letter of intent, not at completion. The second is seasonality and the working capital peg: an HVAC business's working capital in July looks nothing like its February position, and a peg set naively off a twelve-month average can move six figures of value on a mid-sized deal (month-matched versus trailing-average methods can differ by 20-40% in seasonal trades, US adviser analysis). Sellers who bring 24 months of monthly working capital data to the table set the peg; sellers who do not, accept it.

The practical implication: mark your own homework before the buyer's accountants do. A conservatively drawn, evidenced bridge that a QoE review confirms within a few per cent is worth more than any single operational improvement, because it changes the multiple applied to every pound.

The multiple is a quality score

The multiple is not a market constant you look up; it is the buyer's compressed judgement of how safely your earnings transfer to them. Two businesses with identical £750K EBITDA routinely transact more than a full turn apart. The spread is explained by the questions every acquirer's investment committee asks: how much of the revenue is contracted and indexed, what happens when the founder leaves, do the F-Gas records survive scrutiny, how exposed is the book to one supermarket or FM client, and how many credible bidders are at the table. Section five of this guide breaks that judgement into the 30 factors buyers actually score.

Below roughly £250K of earnings: SDE, not EBITDA

At the small end the arithmetic changes basis. An owner-operated business where the owner surveys, quotes, fits and invoices does not have EBITDA in any meaningful sense; it has seller's discretionary earnings: profit plus the owner's full compensation, priced on the understanding that the buyer works in the business. Published guidance generally puts the switch to EBITDA-basis pricing at around $1M of earnings, though in practice buyers start deducting a manager's replacement salary well below that. The only published benchmarks at this size are US and residential-weighted: BizBuySell's sold-deal median for HVAC is 2.58x SDE on a median price of $800K, IBBA's Q4 2025 Market Pulse puts sub-$500K Main Street deals at 2.0x SDE, and DealStream's rules of thumb run 1.5x-3.5x SDE. Read them as floors: a UK commercial contractor with signed PPM agreements, REFCOM certification and a second engineer carries scarcity value that generic marketplace medians, which pool residential one-van operators with everything else, do not capture. No UK-specific dataset for small HVAC deals is published; in our own work, transferability decides where a small business lands far more than the marketplace average does (DealFlowAgent data).

The hardest truth at the small end: a business that is really a well-paid job with a van does not command a multiple at all; it trades near the value of its contracts, kit and goodwill to the nearest competitor. The encouraging corollary is that the first tranche of genuinely transferable earnings is the most valuable earnings a small operator ever builds, and the route to it (signed contracts, a second certificated engineer, separated personal costs) is short and known.

How contracted maintenance books are priced: the honest answer

Recurring revenue is the single strongest multiple lever in this trade, and it is worth being precise about how buyers actually pay for it, because a piece of American folklore keeps appearing in UK conversations.

There is no published per-book pricing convention for HVAC maintenance agreements. Fire alarm and security monitoring accounts trade on a published multiple of recurring monthly revenue (covered properly in our fire safety guide); HVAC has no equivalent. We checked the current publications of every bank and adviser that covers this sector: FOCUS Investment Banking, Capstone Partners, Kroll, Raymond James and PKF O'Connor Davies all describe recurring revenue as the key quality marker, and none publishes a separate multiple for the book. The claim that maintenance agreements are worth "2x-3x their annual value on top of the EBITDA multiple", which circulates on broker blogs, has no transaction dataset behind it and double-counts: the maintenance profit is already inside the EBITDA being multiplied.

What actually happens, in the UK and the US alike, is that buyers price contracted PPM and maintenance-agreement books through the EBITDA multiple, as a quality premium. A business at 40%+ contracted service revenue sits at or above the top of its band on the master table; an install-led business with the same earnings sits at or below the bottom. US residential brokers put the premium for crossing that threshold at roughly half a turn to a full turn of EBITDA (residential data); Kroll's residential HVAC coverage shows platforms built on recurring revenue trading at mid-teens EV/EBITDA while founder-owned tuck-ins trade at 3x-8x, which is the same premium expressed at platform scale. In refrigeration the effect is stronger still, because part of the maintenance calendar is statutory: GB F-Gas rules mandate leak checks every 12, 6 or 3 months depending on system charge, so a contracted supermarket or cold chain book carries visit revenue the client is legally required to keep buying. Measure your contracted revenue share, attrition and per-contract profitability anyway, because sophisticated buyers model the book separately even when the offer letter expresses a blended EBITDA multiple, and the absence of the measurement is priced as if the answer were bad (DealFlowAgent data).

Are you a private equity firm, search fund or strategic buyer actively acquiring HVAC, refrigeration or cooling businesses? Register your acquisition criteria to access off-market deal flow matched to your mandate.

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The size ladder, band by band

Size is the first thing every buyer screens on, before they read a line of your accounts. Each band below states the evidence behind its range, who transacts there, and what changes crossing in. The published evidence base for this trade is heavily American and, at the small end, residential-weighted; where a figure is US or residential we say so, and the honest way to use this ladder is as calibrated judgement anchored to the sources shown, not as a price list. The strongest UK anchor across the whole curve is Dealsuite's UK & Ireland adviser survey (H2 2025): an average of 5.4x EBITDA across all SME sectors, rising from 3.3x at £200K of EBITDA to 8.4x at £10M, a spread of over five turns driven by size alone.

Below £250K earnings: the owner-operator band

Priced on SDE (profit plus the owner's full compensation), on the understanding that the buyer steps into the owner's boots. Typical range 2.0x-3.0x SDE (DealFlowAgent view). The nearest published benchmarks are US and residential-weighted: BizBuySell's 562 sold HVAC businesses show a median of 2.58x SDE, interquartile range 1.99x-3.33x, median price $800K, and IBBA puts sub-$500K Main Street deals at 2.0x SDE. A contracted, certificated UK commercial or refrigeration business should beat those medians, which pool one-van residential operators with everything else. The honest constraint at this size is transferability, not the market. A business that cannot trade without its owner is priced as an income stream rather than an enterprise. The two fastest fixes are signed maintenance agreements in place of habitual repeat work, and a second F-Gas certificated engineer who can hold the diary and the on-call rota; both move a sale from asset-value territory to a genuine multiple.

£250K-£500K defended EBITDA: professional buyers arrive

3.0x-4.5x, with strong contracted books reaching 5x (DealFlowAgent tier view; anchors: Dealsuite's UK size curve starts at 3.3x around £200K EBITDA, all-sector UK&I data; Kroll places founder-owned US tuck-ins at 3x-8x EBITDA, residential, with this band at the bottom of that spread). This is the first band where trade acquirers and consolidators genuinely compete, and several of the UK bolt-ons in our deal table, including businesses of 9 to 25 staff bought by Nordic Climate Group, sit at this size. What changes crossing in: your accounts are read by professionals, so the gap between claimed and defendable EBITDA starts to cost real money, and revenue mix becomes the dominant pricing question. An install-led business here still prices like a job book; a contracted refrigeration service business prices like an annuity.

£500K-£1M defended EBITDA: the consolidators' core bolt-on range

3.5x-5.5x, with 40%+ contracted books reaching 6x (DealFlowAgent tier view; anchors: the Dealsuite UK size curve passes roughly 4x-5x through this band; US residential brokers place businesses below $3M revenue at 2.6x-3.5x SDE and above it at 3.4x-8x EBITDA, residential data). This is the size Nordic Climate Group has been buying roughly monthly across the UK and Ireland, and where Tendra, Bluu Unit and the private trade groups hunt. Because so many funded buyers compete here, process quality is worth as much as any operational lever: the difference between one consolidator negotiating alone and four held in parallel is routinely a full turn. What changes crossing in: debt starts to feature in buyer structures, so your earnings quality is underwritten by a credit committee as well as an investment committee.

£1M-£2M defended EBITDA: the institutional threshold

4.5x-6.5x (DealFlowAgent tier view; anchors: IBBA's Q4 2025 EBITDA medians run 4.1x for $2M-$5M deals, all-sector US floors; the Dealsuite curve passes roughly 5x-6x through this band; PKF O'Connor Davies notes $0.5M-$5M EBITDA service businesses achieving "healthy multiples" with expansion above that, US commercial-leaning). Crossing £1M of defended EBITDA is the single most important size threshold in this market: institutional buyers' minimum-size screens switch on, acquisition debt becomes readily available against your earnings, and PE bolt-on teams that would not open a smaller information memorandum will open yours. Competition widens from trade-plus-consolidators to trade, consolidators, PE platforms and search funds at once. What changes crossing in: buyers begin pricing your second tier of management, not just your contracts.

£2M-£3M defended EBITDA: management depth gets priced

5.0x-7.5x (DealFlowAgent tier view; anchors: IBBA $5M-$50M deals at 5.5x EBITDA, all-sector US floor; the upper Dealsuite curve; UK FM and building services deal activity data showing PE involved in over half of 2025 transactions). At this size a buyer is no longer buying a book of work; it is buying an organisation, and it will price the difference between a business the founder still runs day to day and one with an operations lead, a service manager and a functioning scheduling system. The same £2.5M of EBITDA with a second tier in place and clean data can carry two turns more than the founder-dependent version, which is the largest single spread on this ladder.

£3M-£5M defended EBITDA: platform grade

6.0x-8.5x (DealFlowAgent tier view; anchors: the Dealsuite curve reaches 8.4x at £10M EBITDA; IMAP's UK & Ireland HVAC report puts the services median at 8.5x across its institutional-size transaction sample; Forbes Partners places US commercial HVAC at 7x-11x, US, $50M+ revenue). This is platform grade: PE firms underwrite a business of this size as the foundation of a buy-and-build, the way Triton underwrote James Mercer, Fletchers and Coat as the founding trio of Tendra, and pay a platform premium for the management team, systems and certifications that bolt-ons will be integrated into. What changes crossing in: you stop being priced against other bolt-ons and start being priced against the cost of the buyer assembling your business from three smaller ones.

£5M-£10M defended EBITDA: print territory

7.0x-9.5x (DealFlowAgent tier view; anchors: IMAP UK&I HVAC services median 8.5x, full sample 5.5x-13.6x; the Sureserve take-private at 8.6x EBITDA in 2023 remains the cleanest UK sector print; PKF notes high-quality US service businesses "north of 10x"). Deals here make the trade press with numbers attached: OCS paid £190M for EMCOR UK, roughly 0.45x revenue and 11-12x operating income for a business of far larger scale, and Sureserve paid £56.4M cash for AIM-listed Kinovo. Buyers at this size include listed groups, large PE and, increasingly, European platforms entering the UK. What changes crossing in: structure becomes as negotiable as price, and the quality of your data room sets the pace of the whole process.

£10M+ defended EBITDA: institutional demand, thin UK evidence

8.0x-11x+, structure-dependent, and we say plainly: the UK evidence at this size is thin. Few private UK HVAC businesses of this scale trade in any given year, and consideration is rarely disclosed. The reference points are triangulation: the EMCOR UK sale arithmetic at very large scale; US platform trades (Champions Group at ~18.5x, residential platform; Service Logic, the commercial benchmark, EV undisclosed); and the listed comparators, which mark sentiment rather than achievable private prices: EMCOR trades near 20x EV/EBITDA and Comfort Systems USA above 35x (July 2026, after a 226% twelve-month share price rise on data centre demand; treat it as market enthusiasm, not a private-deal comp), while Houlihan Lokey's facility services composite sits at 13.5x and Lincoln International's facilities services index at 15.3x. A UK business at this size with genuine platform characteristics transacts well above the mid-market ladder, but the specific number is made in the process, not read from a table.

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The 30 factors that set your multiple

Two identical P&Ls can transact two turns apart. The reason is that buyers do not price a P&L; they price thirty or so operational and commercial characteristics that determine whether the P&L repeats under their ownership. The framework below is how we structure that judgement on DealFlowAgent mandates (DealFlowAgent framework; the weights are our house view of how buyers in this trade allocate attention, not a published industry standard). Six dimensions, five factors each, weighted as shown. For each factor, the anchors describe what scores low and what scores high in this trade's own terms.

Note the weighting of the final dimension. Deal Process & Buyer Access carries the same weight as Financial because it explains the persistent, observable fact that identical businesses transact at materially different prices depending on how they are taken to market: how many qualified buyers are found, how competitive tension is held, and how diligence is survived. It is also the only dimension a seller can fully control in the final twelve months.

Dimension 1: Financial (22%)

Dimension 2: Customer & Revenue (16%)

Dimension 3: Operations (14%)

Dimension 4: People & Organisation (13%)

Dimension 5: Strategic (13%)

Dimension 6: Deal Process & Buyer Access (22%)

The 27% figure. Across DealFlowAgent processes, running a competitive, multi-buyer process rather than negotiating with a single acquirer has produced an average uplift of 27% against the opening offer (DealFlowAgent data). We publish the factor framework precisely because most of that uplift is explained by the sixth dimension: the same business, better sold.

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Two worked examples, with the arithmetic shown

Example one: the same £750K, priced £1.5M apart

Two UK businesses, each with £750K of defended EBITDA, both in the £500K-£1M band (3.5x-5.5x).

Business A is install-led: 75% of revenue from air conditioning installation and small works, one loyal but uncontracted commercial customer base, the founder quoting every job, F-Gas logs assembled retrospectively when asked. It is approached directly by one consolidator and negotiates alone. It prices at the bottom of the band:

£750,000 × 3.5 = £2,625,000

Business B earns the same £750K with 45% of revenue from contracted, indexed PPM and refrigeration maintenance across food retail and commercial kitchens, a service manager who runs the diary, complete digital F-Gas registers, and attrition measured at 7%. It is taken to market professionally with four bidders held in parallel. It prices at the top of the band:

£750,000 × 5.5 = £4,125,000

Same earnings, £1,500,000 apart, and the difference is not luck: it is contracted revenue share, compliance records, management depth and process, every one of them a factor from the framework above and every one of them improvable in the one to three years before a sale.

Example two: £2M of EBITDA crossing the platform boundary

A commercial HVAC and refrigeration business with £2M of defended EBITDA sits at the top of the £1M-£2M band (4.5x-6.5x). Sold as it stands, well prepared but positioned simply as a good bolt-on, it prices near the top of its band:

£2,000,000 × 6.5 = £13,000,000

The same business eighteen months later, having grown defended EBITDA to £2.4M, evidenced a full second-tier management team, and been positioned to PE buyers as a platform seed, the foundation a fund can build a regional buy-and-build on, the way Triton underwrote the founding businesses of Tendra, is priced in the £2M-£3M band's upper reaches:

£2,400,000 × 7.5 = £18,000,000

Of the £5M difference, £2.6M is the extra earnings at the old multiple; the remaining £2.4M is pure multiple expansion from crossing the platform boundary with the characteristics platforms are paid for. This is why we tell owners at £1.5M-£2M of EBITDA that the most valuable project in the business is usually not the next contract win; it is the management hire and the systems build that reclassify the business in buyers' eyes.

Where does your business sit on this ladder? The free calculator applies these bands and the factor framework to your numbers. 60 seconds, no obligation. Calculate my valuation

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2025-2026 transaction evidence: UK

Every row below is a verified UK or Ireland HVAC, refrigeration or cooling transaction announced between January 2025 and July 2026, with a clickable public source. Consideration in this market is usually undisclosed; where a number is public we show it, and where it is not we say undisclosed rather than guess.

What this table says when read together. First, refrigeration is not a footnote to UK HVAC M&A; in 2025-2026 it is the centre of it. One buyer, Nordic Climate Group, accounts for over half the rows, and its targets are overwhelmingly commercial refrigeration and cooling service businesses of 9 to 70 staff with food retail, cold storage and retail-estate maintenance books: exactly the profile most owners assume is too small or too specialist to attract European private equity. Second, the disclosed numbers cluster around service and compliance revenue: the two largest disclosed prices (EMCOR UK at £190M, Kinovo at £56.4M) both attach to contracted, regulation-driven books rather than installation businesses. Third, the buyer set has visibly deepened within eighteen months: Altor, Triton (twice, via two separate platforms), CD&R, Cap10 and Pollen Street all deployed into this trade, alongside listed strategics like Trane buying their own UK service channel. For a seller, that is the practical meaning of a competitive process: in 2024 a good refrigeration service business might have had two credible buyers; today the map on this page names eight.

Acquiring in HVAC, refrigeration or building services? Register your acquisition criteria and we will match you to off-market sell-side mandates in your range.

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2025-2026 transaction evidence: US

The US market runs larger, hotter and residential-heavier than the UK, and its disclosed platform trades are the best public evidence of what scaled recurring-revenue books are worth. Residential and commercial rows are labelled: they are different markets and price differently.

What this table says when read together. Three separate markets are visible in one table, and owners should be clear which one they are reading about. The residential platform market is where the spectacular numbers live: Champions at roughly 18.5x, Apex marked at ~$10bn, Sila and Redwood at ten figures. Those multiples attach to platforms with hundreds of thousands of maintenance-agreement customers and professional management, and they are relevant to a UK owner mainly as proof of what recurring consumer revenue is worth at scale, not as comparable pricing; the same platforms buy their individual tuck-ins at 3x-8x EBITDA. The commercial service market is quieter but structurally closer to the UK trade: Service Logic, Bowers, Hattersley and AIR Control Concepts show PE and listed buyers paying for contracted commercial maintenance at every size from family firm to $2.2bn platform. And the cooling and refrigeration market has become a theme of its own: Ecolab, Vertiv and Mill Point deals totalling almost $6bn in seven months, all priced on the demand curve of data centres and cold chains. The read-across for the UK is direct, because the same three-way split (residential cover platforms, commercial service consolidators, refrigeration and cooling specialists) is exactly what the UK table above shows arriving eighteen months later.

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2026 demand drivers and the consolidation map

Buyers do not pay premium multiples because a sector is pleasant; they pay because demand is contractual, statutory or structural. This trade currently has all three, and each driver below is verified against a primary source as of July 2026.

The F-Gas quota cliff: 1 January 2027

Great Britain's HFC quota, currently 31% of baseline, steps down to 24% on 1 January 2027, the sharpest supply squeeze since 2018, and to 21% in 2030 (GB F-Gas phase-down under the assimilated regulation). Defra consulted on going further and faster, and announced in May 2026 that it will not legislate this year, leaving the existing 2027 step in place. The commercial mechanism is blunt: refrigerant for legacy R-404A and R-410A estates gets scarcer and dearer, which forces retrofit-or-replace decisions across every supermarket, cold store and office estate, and that work lands with contractors certificated on A2L and natural refrigerants. Meanwhile the compliance annuity continues regardless: leak checks are mandatory every 12, 6 or 3 months depending on charge size, with records kept five years, and only certificated firms can do the work. In Northern Ireland the EU's tougher 2024 regulation applies, with service bans on high-GWP refrigerants already live, which is also the best forward indicator of where GB reform eventually lands.

The US refrigerant transition: a decade of forced replacement

The AIM Act holds HFC allowances at 60% of baseline through 2028, then cuts to 30% in 2029. The switch of new residential and light-commercial equipment to A2L refrigerants (R-454B, R-32) took effect in January 2025 and promptly produced refrigerant cylinder shortages and double-digit equipment price rises; the EPA removed the R-410A installation deadline in May 2026, easing the cliff but not the direction. From January 2026 a new federal leak-repair rule requires leak-rate monitoring and 30-day repairs on larger systems, creating a statutory service line on commercial refrigeration much like the GB regime. For US contractors this is a decade of replacement demand plus a new compliance annuity, which is a large part of why the platforms in the table above keep paying up.

TM44 inspections: a statutory market running at under 20% compliance

Every air conditioning system in England and Wales with over 12kW of effective rated output must have an accredited TM44 inspection at least every five years, lodged on the EPB register, with a £300 fixed penalty per offence. The government's own consultation analysis found fewer than 20% of systems may have been inspected, and a 2024-25 consultation proposed raising the penalty to around £800 (no outcome yet as of July 2026). For contractors, TM44 is sticky, low-capex statutory survey work with perhaps five times the current market volume legally required to exist, and it cross-sells directly into maintenance and MEES-driven upgrade work. For buyers, a TM44 book is contracted compliance revenue of exactly the kind the deal tables reward.

MEES: the 2031 EPC B deadline for large commercial buildings

In June 2026 the government confirmed the new shape of minimum energy standards for commercial lettings: privately rented non-domestic buildings over 1,000 m² in England and Wales must reach EPC B by 2031 where cost-effective, while smaller buildings stay at the current EPC E floor and the previously proposed 2027 EPC C milestone was dropped. That fires the starting gun on a five-year retrofit programme for every large landlord, and HVAC plant replacement, heat pumps, controls and ventilation upgrades are the highest-impact levers on an EPC score. Contractors serving institutional landlords now have an underwritable capex pipeline to 2031.

Heat pumps: policy-funded demand meeting a capacity gap

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme pays £7,500 toward a heat pump (with a £9,000 uplift for off-gas-grid homes from 21 July 2026, and a new £2,500 air-to-air grant added in April 2026), funded to 2030. The Clean Heat Market Mechanism obliges boiler manufacturers to hit rising heat pump sales targets (8% in scheme year two). The Future Homes Standard, in force March 2027, effectively ends gas boilers in new homes, with heat pump plus solar PV as the notional dwelling. Against that, actual delivery ran at roughly 60,000 MCS-certified heat pump installations in 2025 versus the Warm Homes Plan ambition of over 450,000 a year by 2030. That gap is the growth story: installers with MCS certification and heat pump-trained engineers are scarce assets, which is precisely why Hometree and its peers are buying them.

The engineer shortage and the rising wage floor

Labour is the binding constraint on organic growth in this trade on both sides of the Atlantic. The Institute of Refrigeration's 2026 skills work describes a structural RACHP engineer shortage likely to worsen over the next two to five years, and US projections show about 40,100 HVAC technician openings a year to 2034, growing much faster than average. Meanwhile the UK's National Living Wage rose to £12.71 in April 2026, with the Low Pay Commission's central estimate for April 2027 at £13.18: a recurring ~4% annual escalator under every maintenance contract that lacks indexation. Both facts push the same way on valuation: buyers pay for engineer benches they cannot hire, and discount contracts that cannot pass wage inflation through.

One adjacent note: cooling towers and evaporative condensers also trigger legionella duties under ACOP L8, with mandatory local-authority notification; that regime, and the wider testing, inspection and compliance market, is covered in our compliance, testing and inspection guide.

The consolidation map: who is actually buying

UK and Ireland, active 2025-2026, all verified above: Nordic Climate Group (Altor Fund V; commercial refrigeration and HVACR service, buying roughly monthly), Tendra Technical Services (Triton; M&E and technical services, funded for bolt-ons via Crescent Capital), Bluu Unit (Triton; refrigeration, natural refrigerants, data centres), Sureserve Group (Cap10; heating compliance and energy transition), OCS (CD&R; hard FM and M&E self-delivery), Hometree (Pollen Street; residential heating cover and heat pumps), Trane Technologies/Thermo King (listed; transport refrigeration service), Climate Care Solutions Group (private; regional commercial HVAC). Historical UK consolidator Mecsia (now Synova-backed) made no verified acquisitions in the window but remains a logical buyer.

US, active 2025-2026, all verified above: Apex Service Partners (Alpine, with Apollo minority), Redwood Services (Altas), Sila Services (Goldman Sachs Alternatives), Champions Group (Blackstone, agreed), Southern Home Services (Gryphon), Any Hour Group (Knox Lane), Heartland Home Services (TJC) on the residential side; Service Logic (Bain Capital and Mubadala), Legence (listed, Blackstone-backed), Comfort Systems USA, EMCOR, Foundral (McNally), AIR Control Concepts (Blackstone) on the commercial side; AeriTek (Mill Point), CoolSys (Ares), Ecolab and Vertiv in refrigeration and data centre cooling. Grata's 2026 analysis counts 126,000+ private US HVAC companies with PE-backed firms at roughly 8% of industry employment: the consolidation is early, which is the bull case buyers are underwriting.

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What kills the multiple

The factor framework above describes the upside. This section is the mirror image: the six findings that most reliably cut offers in this trade, written as the buyer's investment committee actually reasons.

1. An install-heavy mix. "Seventy per cent of revenue is installation. Every January this business starts from zero, its backlog depends on construction confidence, and its gross margin is capped by competitive tender. We underwrite the contracted service base and treat the install book as cyclical volume: price it like a contractor, not a service annuity." Install-led businesses in this trade price toward the bottom of every band on the master table, and US evidence puts new-construction-dependent firms at the deepest discounts.

2. Unmeasured maintenance attrition. "The owner says clients never leave, but nothing is measured. If churn is actually 15%, the maintenance book we are paying a premium for melts by half over four years. Since the data does not exist, we assume the answer is bad and price accordingly." Unmeasured metrics are always priced pessimistically; a churn number, even a mediocre one, beats no number.

3. The founder as chief engineer. "The owner personally holds the supermarket relationship, surveys every major job and takes the 2am refrigeration calls. Our purchase price buys a business that degrades the day they stop. Either the price reflects that, or the consideration does: heavier earn-out, longer handcuffs." Founder dependency does not just cut the multiple; it converts cash at close into deferred, conditional money.

4. F-Gas record gaps. "Leak-check logs are incomplete across the estate and refrigerant purchases do not reconcile to logged usage. That is a regulatory exposure we inherit, it suggests other compliance is loose, and it means part of the statutory service revenue we are underwriting was not actually being delivered. Every number in the data room is now less credible." Compliance gaps are priced twice: once as risk, once as doubt about everything else.

5. Concentration in one supermarket or FM client on weak terms. "Forty per cent of revenue sits with one retailer, on the client's paper, terminable on 60 days, with no indexation since 2023. The wage floor rose 4% this April and rises again next year; the contract cannot pass it through. If that client re-tenders after completion we lose our thesis, so we price the whole business as if it will." Concentration on strong, indexed, assignable terms is manageable; concentration on weak terms is a multiple killer.

6. Fragmented job systems. "Asset histories live in one dispatcher's memory, three spreadsheets and a shed of paper job sheets. We cannot verify the maintenance schedule, engineer utilisation or per-contract profitability without rebuilding the records ourselves, so integration costs go up and confidence in EBITDA goes down." Buyers pay for what they can verify. A single field service management system that a diligence team can query is worth real money at exit, which is why it appears in the five moves at the top of this page.

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Deal structure by size: headline price versus cash at close

The multiple sets the headline; the structure decides what you bank, and when. The published evidence:

At the small end (US Main Street data, all sectors): deals overwhelmingly complete with high cash at close: 76-89% of consideration across size bands, with seller financing at 9-14% and earn-outs used sparingly at 1-6% (IBBA Market Pulse). US buyers' financing floor widened materially in July 2026 when the SBA doubled its cumulative loan cap to $10M, pulling more small HVAC deals into bankable territory.

In the mid-market: earn-outs are common and rising. SRS Acquiom's 2026 study found earn-outs in 24% of 2025 US private deals, with median earn-out potential around a third of the closing payment, and CMS found earn-outs in 27% of 2025 European deals, the equal-highest ever recorded, with 55% of them measured on EBIT or EBITDA. In the UK specifically, 39% of advisers reported increased earn-out usage and 26% more vendor loans through 2025 (Dealsuite). Escrows and holdbacks featured in 88% of US deals, at a median of 10% of value on uninsured deals.

Completion mechanics differ by market: European and UK deals split between completion accounts (used with a price adjustment in 48% of 2025 European deals, with working capital components in about half of those) and locked box (used in 54% of the deals without an adjustment); US deals near-universally use completion adjustments. For a seasonal HVAC business the working capital peg is a live negotiation, not boilerplate, for the reasons covered in the valuation mechanics section.

Rollover equity: in PE platform deals, sellers are commonly asked to reinvest a minority stake alongside the sponsor. Adviser consensus puts typical rollover at 10-30% of proceeds; no primary dataset publishes trade-services rollover norms, so treat specific percentages as negotiating context rather than market data (house view). Rollover is neither good nor bad in itself: it is a second bet on the platform, and it should be priced and diligenced like one.

What we tell sellers (DealFlowAgent view): negotiate structure with the same energy as price. A £10M headline at 60% cash with a two-year EBITDA earn-out on the buyer's accounting policies can be worth less than £8.5M with 95% at completion. The levers that keep consideration in cash at close are the same ones the factor framework scores: management depth, contracted revenue, defensible EBITDA and a competitive process with a live underbidder.

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UK versus US: what actually differs

Three implications for a UK owner. First, the US premium is real but not portable: US platforms pay more because they operate in a deeper, older consolidation with cheaper scale debt and a residential membership model the UK is only beginning to copy; a UK business gets the benefit of that premium not by quoting US multiples but by selling into a process that includes US and European buyers entering the UK, which is now happening (Nordic Climate, Bluu Unit, and Trane's dealer buy-ins are all foreign capital buying UK service books). Second, UK certification is an asset in a sale, not just an obligation: because F-Gas company certification, Gas Safe registration and MCS scope sit at company level, a clean, audited certification stack transfers with the shares and is priced; the US equivalent (state licences held through qualifiers) frequently is not, which is one reason UK share deals of certificated businesses are cleaner than their US counterparts. Third, the two refrigerant transitions are the same tailwind on different calendars: GB's 2027 quota step and the US 2029 allowance cliff both force estate replacement and both make certificated service capacity scarcer; owners who can evidence A2L and natural-refrigerant capability are selling into both stories at once.

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Frequently asked questions

How much is my HVAC business worth in 2026? UK HVAC, refrigeration and cooling businesses are priced on defended EBITDA. In 2026, businesses between £250K and £2M of EBITDA typically transact between 3.0x and 6.5x depending on size, revenue mix and process, with contracted service books at the top of each range and install-led businesses at the bottom. Above £3M of EBITDA, platform-grade businesses reach 6.0x to 9.5x. Owner-operated businesses below roughly £250K of earnings are priced on SDE instead, typically 2.0x-3.0x. The full size ladder on this page shows the evidence behind each band.

What multiple do HVAC companies sell for? Most UK small and mid-sized HVAC businesses sell between 3.0x and 6.5x EBITDA. The two biggest drivers are size (UK data shows multiples rising from roughly 3.3x at £200K of EBITDA to 8.4x at £10M across sectors) and contracted revenue share (40%+ contracted maintenance moves a business toward or above the top of its band). US multiples run higher, especially for residential platforms, but do not transfer directly to UK pricing.

How do buyers value HVAC maintenance agreements and PPM contracts? Through the EBITDA multiple, as a quality premium, not as a separate price per contract. No investment bank or transaction database publishes a standalone multiple for HVAC maintenance books, unlike fire and security monitoring accounts, which do trade on published recurring-revenue multiples. A business with 40%+ contracted, indexed, low-churn maintenance revenue prices at or above the top of its size band; the claim that maintenance agreements are worth 2x-3x their annual value on top of the EBITDA multiple has no published transaction evidence behind it and double-counts the same profit.

What is a commercial refrigeration business worth? Commercial refrigeration service businesses are currently among the most sought-after assets in the trade: one European buyer alone, Nordic Climate Group, has bought more than ten UK and Irish refrigeration and cooling businesses since November 2025. They are priced on the same defended-EBITDA ladder as HVAC, and well-run contracted books price at the top of their bands because part of the maintenance calendar is statutory: GB F-Gas rules require leak checks every 12, 6 or 3 months depending on system charge, so food retail and cold chain service revenue is legally recurring. Concentration in a single supermarket on weak contract terms is the main discount to watch.

Does the F-Gas regulation help or hurt my valuation? It helps sellers who can evidence compliance and hurts those who cannot. The statutory leak-check calendar creates recurring, non-discretionary service revenue, and the quota step-down to 24% of baseline on 1 January 2027 drives retrofit and replacement work toward contractors certificated on lower-GWP refrigerants. But incomplete F-Gas records are one of the six findings that most reliably cut offers, because buyers price a compliance gap as risk across the whole business.

What is the difference between SDE and EBITDA, and which applies to me? SDE (seller's discretionary earnings) is profit plus the owner's entire compensation, used to price owner-operated businesses where the buyer will work in the business, generally below roughly £250K-£1M of earnings depending on how owner-dependent the business is. EBITDA-basis pricing, with a market salary deducted for a manager, takes over as the business becomes genuinely management-run. The distinction matters because an owner quoting an "EBITDA multiple" on what is really SDE will overestimate the price by the cost of their own replacement.

Should I sell my HVAC or refrigeration business now? The 2025-2026 market is the deepest buyer pool this trade has had in the UK: eight named, funded platforms are actively acquiring, European and US capital is entering, and statutory demand drivers (F-Gas, TM44, MEES, heat pump policy) are underwriting buyer confidence through 2031. That does not make now the right time for every owner; it makes preparation the deciding variable. A business that enters this market with contracted revenue, clean F-Gas records, a second management tier and a competitive process captures the top of its band; the same business approached cold by a single consolidator does not.

How long does it take to sell an HVAC business? US survey data puts small-business sales at roughly 6 to 12 months from launch to close, lengthening with deal size, and UK mid-market processes run comparably. The two biggest schedule risks are both preparation failures: an EBITDA bridge that falls apart in quality-of-earnings review, and missing operational data (contract terms, attrition, F-Gas records) that buyers must reconstruct during diligence. Sellers who prepare the data room before launch routinely complete a quarter faster than those who assemble it reactively.

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Glossary

• A2L refrigerants: lower-GWP, mildly flammable refrigerants (R-32, R-454B) replacing R-410A in new equipment; handling them requires updated engineer certification.
• Add-back: a cost added back to reported profit to show earnings under new ownership; survives diligence only if one-off, personal and documented.
• AIM Act: the US law phasing down HFC refrigerants; next allowance cliff 2029.
• Bolt-on: an acquisition made by an existing platform, priced below platform deals.
• Cash at close: consideration paid at completion, as opposed to deferred, earn-out or rollover amounts.
• Defended EBITDA: the adjusted EBITDA figure that survives a buyer's quality-of-earnings review; the number that actually gets priced.
• Earn-out: deferred consideration contingent on post-completion performance; present in roughly a quarter of US and European deals.
• EBITDA: earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation; the standard earnings basis for management-run businesses.
• Enterprise value (EV): the whole-business price before adjusting for cash, debt and working capital.
• F-Gas certification: the legal requirement for companies and engineers working on equipment containing fluorinated gases; company certificates issued by REFCOM and peers.
• FSM software: field service management platforms holding assets, scheduling, job history and invoicing; a diligence asset in a sale.
• Gas Safe Register: the statutory register for businesses and engineers doing gas work in Great Britain.
• GWP: global warming potential; the metric refrigerant phase-downs are measured against.
• Locked box: a UK/European completion mechanism fixing price at a historic balance sheet date, alternative to completion accounts.
• MCS: the certification scheme required for installers delivering grant-funded heat pump and renewables work.
• MEES: minimum energy efficiency standards for let buildings; EPC B by 2031 for large commercial lets.
• Platform: a PE-backed company built to acquire others in its sector; platform-grade businesses command premium multiples.
• PPM: planned preventative maintenance; contracted, scheduled service work, the premium revenue type in this trade.
• Quality of earnings (QoE): the buyer-side accounting review that tests adjusted EBITDA line by line.
• Rollover equity: the portion of proceeds a seller reinvests into the acquiring platform.
• SDE: seller's discretionary earnings; profit plus the owner's full compensation, the pricing basis for owner-operated businesses.
• TM44: the statutory five-yearly inspection of air conditioning systems over 12kW in England and Wales.
• Working capital peg: the agreed normal level of working capital delivered at completion; seasonally sensitive in HVAC and negotiated, not boilerplate.

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Methodology and sources

This guide was rebuilt in July 2026 from primary and named secondary sources, each checked in-run. Multiples for private UK HVAC businesses are not published by size band anywhere; the master table is therefore a DealFlowAgent tier view calibrated against the published evidence below and the 44 verified 2025-2026 transactions in the deal tables. Where evidence is US-only, residential-only or thin, the copy says so. House figures (the tier ranges, the 27% process uplift, the 12,900+ acquirer network, indicative margin assumptions) are labelled DealFlowAgent data throughout.

Multiples and market data: Dealsuite UK&I M&A Monitor (Feb 2026); IMAP UK & Ireland HVAC Sector Report (2024); Kroll, M&A in Residential HVAC Services (Nov 2025); Forbes Partners, Commercial HVAC M&A (Oct 2025); PKF O'Connor Davies US HVAC M&A Update (Summer 2025); Capstone Partners HVAC Services Market Update (Dec 2025) and Middle Market Valuations Index (Apr 2026); Houlihan Lokey Facility & Residential Services Q3 2025; Lincoln International Facilities Services Q4 2025; Origin Merchant Partners HVACR Review Q4 2025; IBBA/M&A Source Market Pulse (Q3 2025, Q4 2025); BizBuySell HVAC valuation benchmarks (2021-2025 sold data); DealStream HVAC rules of thumb; Grata, The PE Playbook: HVAC (Jul 2026); Grant Thornton UK built-environment services review (2025); Moore Kingston Smith FM & Property Services M&A Insight (Jun 2026); stockanalysis.com listed comparators (retrieved 14 Jul 2026).

Transactions: company and sponsor press releases (Triton, Altor/Nordic Climate Group pressroom, Pollen Street, Sureserve, OCS, Blackstone, Bain Capital, Alpine, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Altas, Gryphon, Knox Lane, Mill Point, McNally, Ecolab, Vertiv, Lennox, Watsco, EMCOR, Comfort Systems USA, Johnson Controls, Trane Technologies); Cooling Post; ACHR News; Construction Wave; TheBusinessDesk; SMMT; Maven Capital Partners; Business Wire; PR Newswire; GlobeNewswire; PE Hub; Homepros; US News.

Regulation and demand: gov.uk (F-Gas guidance, TM44 guidance and EPB consultation analysis, MEES interim response Jun 2026, Future Homes Standard Building Circular 01/2026, Warm Homes Plan, National Living Wage); Ofgem (Boiler Upgrade Scheme); legislation.gov.uk; HSE; EPA and Hunton AIM Act tracking; US Bureau of Labor Statistics; MCS; REFCOM; Institute of Refrigeration; Bank of England (Jun 2026 MPC); Federal Reserve (Jun 2026 FOMC).

Deal structure: SRS Acquiom 2026 Deal Terms Study; CMS European M&A Study 2026; Dealsuite UK&I Monitors (Aug 2025, Feb 2026); IBBA Market Pulse; SBA (Jul 2026 loan cap change); BizBuySell seller financing reporting.

Update policy: the master table, both deal tables and the regulatory calendar are reviewed quarterly. Next scheduled review: October 2026. If you find an error of fact anywhere on this page, tell us and we will correct it within one working week.

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About DealFlowAgent

DealFlowAgent is a specialist sell-side M&A advisory for essential-services businesses. We work deepest in building services: HVAC, refrigeration and cooling alongside fire and life safety, security, electrical and the wider compliance trades, plus healthcare services. Our advisers have completed transactions from £300K to £120M, and our registered network of 12,900+ acquirers across the UK and US (DealFlowAgent data) is matched to live mandates daily. Across our processes, running a competitive, multi-buyer sale rather than negotiating with a single acquirer has produced an average uplift of 27% against the opening offer (DealFlowAgent data). We exhibited at Interschutz in Germany and at the UK Fire Safety Event in April, and we publish these guides because informed owners run better processes, whoever advises them.

Calculate my valuation · 60-second calculator using the evidence on this page. https://www.dealflowagent.com/valuation?utm_source=valuation_guide&utm_medium=mid_context_cta&utm_campaign=Calculate%20my%20valuation&utm_content=hvac-multiples

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Related valuation guides

• Electrical Multiples 2026
• Fire Safety Multiples 2026
• Security Systems Multiples 2026
• Compliance, Testing & Inspection Multiples 2026

Mechanical & engineering niches: HVAC · Air Conditioning · Ventilation · Commercial Refrigeration · Commercial Kitchen · Heat Pumps

General trades: Plumbing · Electricians · Building Automation · Insulation & Energy

Cross-sector: Fire Safety · Security Systems

This guide is general market commentary, not a valuation of any specific business, and not financial, tax or legal advice. Multiples shown are ranges observed or estimated across many transactions; any individual business may price outside them. Figures labelled DealFlowAgent data are our own house data, not published market statistics.

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