New Deals: A home staging firm with part-time owner, salon suite leasing with 95% occupancy, and 3 other finds...

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NEW DEALS

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📍 Location: New Mexico
💰 Asking Price: $3,000,000
💼 EBITDA: $642,000
📊 Revenue: $1,900,000
📅 Established: 2009

💭 My 2 Cents: A slow housing market hurts almost everyone who touches a home sale, but a staging company gets paid more. The initial contract covers the first 30 to 90 days, and every month past that renews at 20 to 30% of the upfront price against furniture the client already paid for. Capacity rather than taste is what wins the work, because the default operator is a one or two person shop working out of a storage unit and quoting a week out. This company holds the largest inventory in its market and runs 2 crews that install the same day. It staged more than 300 homes last year across two metros on under 25 owner hours a week, with a Project Coordinator running operations and staff. Three things would tell me whether that model is holding: the share of revenue coming from renewals rather than initial installs, the split between agent-paid and homeowner-paid work (an agent who stages every listing is a recurring account, a homeowner is one transaction), and how much of the inventory is out on jobs in peak season, because the gap between that and a full warehouse is how much room there is to grow without buying more furniture. The timing works in a buyer's favor too, because the nearest competitor recently shut down, and this business has already absorbed both its furniture and client referrals.

📍 Location: Texas
💰 Asking Price: $2,220,000
💼 EBITDA: $429,504
📊 Revenue: $1,201,262
📅 Established: 2013

💭 My 2 Cents: Most salon owners employ their stylists and take a cut of every service, which puts them in the labor business, while this one is a landlord whose tenant is the stylist rather than the person in the chair. A stylist has three choices: a commission split at someone else's salon, a suite like these where she keeps the whole ticket, or her own storefront and the buildout that comes with it. The middle one is the only choice that buys independence without capital, and the pool of stylists keeps growing, with stylist employment projected to rise 7% through 2033. In fact, occupancy runs 95 to 100% across roughly 70 suites, and the seller has been raising rents on schedule. The business collects roughly $127 a square foot, five to six times what comparable Texas retail asks, and that spread is where the money is made. The owner puts in 15 to 20 hours a week while a manager covers the second location, and furniture and fixtures total under $50,000, so there is very little here a buyer has to keep funding. The spread disappears when the master leases end, so I'd want remaining term and renewal options on both, annual suite turnover with what it costs to fill an empty one, and whether tenants sign 12 month agreements or sit month to month, because a building that is full on annual agreements is a very different asset from one that could empty in 30 days. They have already made this model work at two locations, so the obvious growth path for a buyer is a third site.

📍 Location: South Carolina
💰 Asking Price: $2,351,469
💼 EBITDA: $568,482
📊 Revenue: $6,431,141
📅 Established: 2000s

💭 My 2 Cents: Fireplaces have been disappearing from new construction, and by the end of the 2010s most new homes were being built without one. That reads like a shrinking category until you look at the installed base, where more than half of American homes still have a hearth. The usual model is to sell the appliance and hand the install to a subcontractor, earning once and giving the rest away. This company does all of it in-house, from the sale to the sweep, carrying more than 30 brands and 35 units on a live showroom floor. The margin is low, which likely means appliances move at thin markups while the service work carries the profit. That said, I'd want to see the split between install revenue and service revenue, what share of the service work comes from appliances this company never sold, and how much of the showroom inventory is financed (since that interest can sit outside the earnings number). What a buyer is really acquiring is two decades of customer relationships, and in this trade that list is worth more than the showroom.

📍 Location: Multi-state
💰 Asking Price: $3,350,000
💼 EBITDA: $650,000
📊 Revenue: $4,000,000
📅 Established: 2000s

💭 My 2 Cents: Grounds maintenance and snow management look like one business because they share a crew, but they get paid in completely different ways. Mowing gets billed on a schedule anyone can predict, and snow usually gets billed on weather nobody can. This operator has been at it for more than 20 years across several states with commercial contracts already in place. I'd want the mix between seasonal flat-rate agreements and per-push billing, along with the trigger depths (how much snow has to fall before the company gets paid to show up) and whether salt sits inside the contract price or bills on top. A flat-rate contract collects the same fee in a mild February and a punishing one, while per-push does the reverse. This past January brought one of the most severe winter events in decades, so I'd want several winters of numbers rather than one. I'd also want the split between grounds revenue and snow revenue, and how much of it comes from the same customers buying both, since a property that hires one crew year-round is a sturdier relationship than two separate accounts. And I'd want the renewal rate and how long these customers have been around. The snow work is what keeps these crews on payroll through the winter, and in a trade where labor is the hardest thing to hold onto, that is not easy to rebuild.

📍 Location: Florida
💰 Asking Price: $2,100,000
💼 EBITDA: $562,776
📊 Revenue: $2,428,314
📅 Established: 2003

💭 My 2 Cents: A single line in the Florida building code created this category. Swapping glass in an older home is fine until you pass 25% of the home's total glass area in a 12 month period, and past that, whatever goes in has to be hurricane rated, which costs far more. A sliding door is usually the biggest piece of glass in a house, so replacing one can trip that limit by itself. Fixing the rollers and the track is not a replacement, so none of it applies. This shop has done nothing but rollers, tracks and hardware for 23 years, and salt air keeps the work coming. I'd want the mix between one-off homeowner calls and standing accounts with condominium associations and property managers, since a single tower can hold hundreds of identical doors. I'd also want average ticket against technician count, because this business grows by training people and stocking vans rather than by advertising. And I'd want to know what happens when a door is past repairing, because that customer then needs a hurricane rated replacement and somebody is getting paid for it. A buyer here inherits demand that does not wait for anyone to buy or sell a house, which is unusual in any business attached to residential real estate.