Every economic system in history eventually stops rewarding whoever holds the tool and starts rewarding whoever holds the relationship. Medieval land was worthless without a lord’s charter granting the right to trade what it produced. Guild membership, not the tools in a craftsman’s workshop, decided who could sell what to whom in a medieval town. Capital has spent centuries drifting from the object doing the work toward whatever structure controls access to the customer on the other end of it. Private equity buying moving companies is the newest chapter of an old story.
In 1998, a private equity firm didn’t buy a moving company. It built one. Clayton, Dubilier & Rice used a holding company to purchase North American Van Lines from Norfolk Southern, the railroad that had inherited it as a leftover diversification bet. A year later, the same firm bought Allied Van Lines and Pickfords out of NFC plc, a UK transport conglomerate. The combined company became SIRVA. Allied dates to 1928. North American dates to 1933. Two of the most recognized moving brand names in American households have now spent more of their corporate life under financial-sponsor ownership than under any founding family that built them.
That isn’t a rumor about where the industry is headed. It’s a paper trail, and it keeps growing. SIRVA has changed financial owners three more times since 1998. Aurora Resurgence and Equity Group Investments took control out of the company’s 2008 bankruptcy. Madison Dearborn Partners bought it from them in a deal announced in May 2018. In August 2024, a consortium of credit funds took over the equity through a debt recapitalization, according to SIRVA’s own announcement. The consortium included arms of KKR, BlackRock, Evolution Credit Partners and Indaba Capital. Four separate, sophisticated capital allocators have now looked at the same relocation company across 25 years and each decided it was worth owning.
None of them were buying trucks. SIRVA runs on an agent network: independently owned moving companies operate under the Allied and North American names, own their own equipment, and pay for the affiliation. Through four ownership changes, SIRVA’s revolving owners have held onto three things: the brand-licensing relationship, the referral system that assigns work to agents, and the corporate relocation contracts with Fortune 500 companies that route every transferred employee through the same mover year after year. The fleet was never the asset changing hands.
SIRVA is the deepest paper trail in the industry, not the only one. Roark Capital’s ServiceMaster Brands bought Two Men and a Truck, a 380-location franchise system spanning 46 states plus Canada, the UK and Ireland, in August 2021. The seller was the Sheets family, who built the company starting in 1985. Roark also controls the parent companies behind Dunkin’ and Arby’s. Its interest in a moving franchise wasn’t about equipment either. Franchisees own their own trucks. Roark bought the brand, the national marketing engine, and the territory-licensing system that turns one local mover into 380 of them.
PODS tells the cleanest version of the story, because its private equity owner ran the thesis out in the open. Arcapita, a Bahrain-based investment firm, bought PODS from its founder for roughly $430 million in December 2007. In March 2014, PODS Enterprises, still under Arcapita, bought out Storage Mobility, its own largest franchisee. The deal added 21 markets across nine states, one piece of a run that converted 39 markets from franchised to company-owned in three years. Arcapita wasn’t adding trucks; Storage Mobility’s trucks already existed and kept running under the same drivers. Arcapita was buying back territory rights and the customer relationships those markets already had. Eleven months later, in February 2015, Arcapita sold the consolidated company to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan for more than $1 billion, more than doubling its original investment. The franchise buyback wasn’t a side project. It reads like exactly the kind of consolidation a seller runs deliberately before an exit.
What a buyer is paying for
Ask a business valuation firm what a moving company is worth on its own. The number is unglamorous. Peak Business Valuation, which specializes in exactly this kind of sale, puts most independent movers at 1.8 to 3.5 times seller’s discretionary earnings. That range lines up with BizBuySell’s own transaction data, which shows roughly half of moving and shipping businesses selling in a similar 1.8x-to-3.1x band. The multiple prices a truck fleet, a lease, and whatever goodwill a buyer can be convinced will survive the sale. It’s a number closer to liquidation value than to growth value. Peak’s own note on the subject says exactly why it moves: operations with corporate relocation accounts and van-line agency status clear meaningfully higher multiples than that baseline. That’s the whole thesis of this article, stated by an appraiser with no reason to make the argument for anyone.
A truck depreciates on a schedule the IRS already publishes. A corporate relocation contract compounds instead. When an HR department has routed every transferred employee to the same mover for years without a competitive rebid, that relationship doesn’t reset with a new owner. It’s exactly the kind of asset built to survive a change of ownership intact, which is why buyers price it like one.
Home services makes the same math visible at a larger scale. Private equity has been buying HVAC and plumbing companies faster than it’s been buying moving companies. More of those deals get reported, too. A standalone HVAC or plumbing shop sells in roughly the same 2x-to-3.5x range as an independent mover, according to multiple business-valuation trackers. Fold that identical shop into a platform with a shared call center, a shared marketing budget and a base of recurring maintenance contracts instead of one-off service calls. The exit multiple on the assembled platform jumps to 17x-to-20x EBITDA. Champions Group is a platform built from roughly twenty previously independent HVAC, plumbing and electrical brands, with more than 1,800 field technicians. Blackstone’s agreement to acquire it, announced in February 2026, was reported by Bloomberg at approximately $2.5 billion. Trade analysts who track the sector estimate that price at close to 18.5 times the platform’s EBITDA, on roughly $140 million of it. That would be among the richest multiples ever reported for a residential trades business. Blackstone hasn’t confirmed the exact figures, but nobody disputes that the technicians didn’t get more skilled the week the platform assembled around them, and the service vans didn’t change. The same labor now sits behind a demand system nobody has to build from scratch. That’s what changed.
Apollo Global Management announced a $2 billion investment in Apex Service Partners, a platform spanning 75 local home-services brands across 46 states. The announcement alone proves the point, without needing an estimated multiple at all. Apollo’s stated rationale is Apex’s national footprint and its technology and talent infrastructure, not its fleet of service vans. Nobody underwrites a $10 billion valuation on the depreciation schedule of a truck.
Every deal above prices the same asset this industry rarely names directly: who owns the customer, not who owns the fleet.
Same trucks, different price
Run the numbers on two regional movers. Both are hypothetical. Neither input is invented; every figure comes from the ranges cited above rather than a guess.
Operator A runs 15 trucks and generates $8 million in annual revenue. Roughly 70% of jobs come from marketplace leads and paid search; the rest comes from an aging referral base built by an owner now in his sixties. Seller’s discretionary earnings run close to $900,000. At the industry’s standard 1.8x-to-3.5x range, a buyer prices that business somewhere between $1.6 million and $3.15 million. Most of that number is the fleet, the lease, and a couple of years of goodwill a buyer isn’t confident will transfer. If the owner walked away tomorrow, a large share of the revenue would walk with him. It was never really the business’s to sell. It was rented, one lead at a time, from whoever sold the ad click or the marketplace listing.
Operator B runs the same 15 trucks and generates the same $8 million in revenue. But a third of it comes from two corporate relocation contracts, the kind an HR department has routed to the same mover for six straight years without ever re-bidding it. Another chunk comes from a direct-booking website that converts without a marketplace taking a cut. That operator sits at the top of the same appraiser’s range, or above it, because a buyer can point to something that survives the change of ownership: contracts with a renewal history and a demand channel nobody has to hand back the keys to.
Same trucks. Same revenue. A buyer looking at Operator B isn’t valuing the fleet any differently than Operator A’s fleet. They’re pricing the fact that Operator B’s demand doesn’t evaporate the day the owner stops personally answering the phone.
The fair objection
Private equity ownership isn’t automatically good for the moving or home-services industries. An operator shouldn’t be hoping for a call from Roark or Blackstone. The record on PE-owned service platforms includes real, well-documented complaints: technician schedules built around utilization targets rather than job quality, and upsell pressure baked into every service call. Price increases follow the same pattern: the kind a standalone local shop would never risk putting its own name behind. Reading a $2.5 billion deal announcement and seeing only the number skips the half of the story that matters just as much. Once a platform’s owners are managing toward the next exit instead of the next decade in one town, service quality tends to slip.
That critique is worth taking seriously, and it doesn’t undercut the valuation argument. It reinforces it. If aggressive cost-cutting can happen inside these platforms and the EBITDA still supports an 18.5x exit, the multiple isn’t rewarding the technicians’ craft or the trucks’ condition at all. It’s pricing the demand system sitting on top of them. That system keeps producing revenue almost independent of what happens underneath it. That’s not a reason to root for the acquisition. It’s the strongest evidence available for where the value sits.
What this means if you’re never selling
Most people reading this article aren’t fielding calls from private equity, and most never will. A moving company that does eventually sell, if it sells at all, is far more likely to go to a regional competitor or a family member at a number close to Operator A’s than Operator B’s. That’s exactly why the acquisition data is useful now, not only at the moment of exit. A buyer’s price sheet is a candid, unpaid audit of what holds value in a service business, built by people who have no reason to flatter the seller.
Run that audit on your own operation before anyone else does.
What share of this year’s revenue came from a channel you own outright, a repeat corporate account, a direct-booking site, a referral network you could name, against a channel you rent by the lead?
We built the Direct Demand Ratio to put a real number on that split. The exercise matters independent of any acquisition conversation. A private equity buyer would pay a premium multiple for one specific asset: the one that keeps a business standing when a marketplace changes its pricing, a lead reseller raises its rates, or an AI agent starts building someone else’s shortlist instead of yours.
That asset is buildable without selling anything. A platform built on a business’s own brand is the same category of asset the deals above got priced for, minus the part where someone else ends up holding the keys. The difference is demand infrastructure: running corporate accounts and repeat relationships as real systems, not side projects. The industry’s own acquirers have already published an answer to what’s worth owning in a moving company. The only question left is whether an operator is building that thing, or renting it from someone who already knows exactly what it’s worth.
Movaros builds what buyers already pay a premium for.
Building on shared infrastructure grows exactly the asset four separate acquirers priced above the fleet in this piece.
