“My revenue is up, so why am I making less money than I was ten years ago?”
That question comes up more than any other in conversations with operators across the network we work with. It arrives without self-pity. These are people who read their own numbers every month and cannot get the two halves of the page to agree with each other.
One of them leads his category. More trucks than anyone near him, more moves booked last year than in any year before it, a name that people in the trade recognize on sight. He said his revenue has climbed almost every year for a decade and his profit is worse than it was ten years ago. Then he said the part that ended the small talk. The direct book is gone. Not thinner. Gone. Almost nothing arrives at his company any more with his own name already attached to it.
He is the biggest operator in his market and he does not own his customers. Nobody smaller than him should assume they are exempt.
The job never changed. The ownership did.
Load the truck. Protect the goods. Turn up on the day you said you would. A crew from 1995 could work a job in 2026 and recognize every part of it except the paperwork. The physical work of moving people has not been disrupted, automated, offshored or reinvented, and nobody in this trade needs to be told that, because they did it last Tuesday.
What changed sits upstream of the truck. It is the answer to a question that used to be obvious: whose customer is this?
Watch how far that question has traveled. In its 2022 rulemaking on household goods, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration printed a warning to consumers in the federal record: a shipper “should know if the company you are dealing with is a household goods motor carrier (mover) or household goods broker.” The regulator has to say that out loud because the customer can no longer tell. In the same docket, movers themselves asked FMCSA to strip the names of additional carriers off the bill of lading, arguing to the agency that doing so would “remove confusion about who is actually performing the move.” FMCSA refused, on the grounds that a shipper needs to know which carriers touched their belongings in order to sue the right one.
Read that exchange again. A federal agency and the moving industry spent public comment cycles arguing about whether the customer should be told who moved them. Thirty years ago that would have been a strange thing to argue about.
How the customer left, one channel at a time
Nobody sold their customer base. That is what makes this hard to see. The relationship left in pieces, through four separate doors, each one reasonable on the day it opened.
The van line. The agent model is the oldest version of this and the least resented, because it came with real benefits: a national brand, long-haul capacity, a claims process. It also came with a quiet term. The customer books Allied or northAmerican; a local family business does the work. Whose name goes in the thank-you note is not ambiguous. Those brands are now financial assets in their own right. Sirva owns Allied, northAmerican and Global Van Lines. In August 2024, it handed control to a group of credit funds managed by KKR Credit Advisors, Evolution Credit Partners, BlackRock and Indaba Capital, when the transaction closed. The trucks belong to agents. The name on them belongs to a lender syndicate.
The corporate intermediary. In the corporate segment, the shift is measured, dated and published, which is rare in this industry. Atlas Van Lines has run its Corporate Relocation Survey since 1968. Its 2021 edition found that more than 80% of companies outsourced relocation services the prior year, a historical high. Outsourcing among small firms reached 72%, which Atlas described as “roughly double the previous 12-year average of around one-third.” An HR manager who once phoned a mover now phones a relocation management company, which phones the mover. The mover’s customer became the mover’s client’s supplier’s vendor.
The marketplace. Sirelo lists more than 26,000 moving companies and says over 200,000 consumers requested quotes through it in 2025. The economics of that model are stated plainly in a document nobody in moving reads, which is Angi’s annual report. Angi runs HomeAdvisor and Handy across more than 500 home service categories. Its 10-K defines consumer connection revenue as fees paid by professionals for consumer matches, “regardless of whether the professional ultimately provides the requested service.” That parenthetical is the whole business. The platform is paid when the introduction happens. Whether anyone loads a truck afterwards is the tradesman’s problem. Roughly 168,000 professionals paid Angi for matches or advertising in the last quarter of 2024. We have written about what a marketplace lead really costs once you price the losses and about the tax you pay on every job someone else originated.
The owner of the brand itself. Financial buyers worked out the value of originated demand well before most operators did. Apollo put $2 billion into Apex Service Partners at a $10 billion valuation. Apex is a home services platform assembled since 2019 with more than 7,800 tradespeople. Nobody underwrites $10 billion on a fleet of service vans. The same logic is now running through the moving industry.
Four doors, four sensible decisions, one cumulative result. The operator who leads his category told us his direct book is gone. He did not lose it in a bad quarter. It went a little at a time, over twenty years, in increments too small to show up in any single year’s numbers and large enough in aggregate to change what his business is.
Now comes the fair objection, because this reader has heard a version of this pitch before and is entitled to push back. We have always worked with agents and lead sources. The customer still chooses us, because we do good work. Some of that is true. Crews still get requested by name, and a well-run company still wins on service. But look at what “chooses us” means in practice today. The customer chose a platform, the platform chose a shortlist, and the operator was on it. Being selected from a shortlist you did not assemble is a different asset from being called directly, and a buyer prices the two very differently.
What it did to what these companies are worth
Start with the arithmetic on revenue, because that question deserves a real answer rather than a mood.
IBISWorld puts the US moving services industry at $25.7 billion in 2026, growing at a 2.1% compound rate since 2021. Over the same five years, the number of moving businesses grew at 1.3% a year, to 9,430. Do the compounding. The market is about 11% larger than it was in 2021 and it is split between about 7% more companies, so revenue per company is up roughly 4% in nominal terms across five years. Now put that next to what happened to money: $100 in January 2021 buys what $124.34 buys in January 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nominal revenue per moving company rose about 4%. Prices rose about 24%.
That is the first half of the answer, and it owes nothing to opinion. In real terms the average moving company is running a smaller business than it was five years ago, while its invoices get bigger every year. Diesel, wages, insurance and trucks all repriced at the inflation number. The revenue did not.
Revenue per company is not the same as margin, and we should say so plainly. Honestly, nobody publishes the number that would settle this precisely, because the household moving industry does not have the trade research infrastructure that hotels or freight have. The absence is itself part of the story, and we have argued that at length elsewhere. Freight, at least, has since run the whole experiment: what digital forwarding did to the forwarders underneath is now on the record.
One number does settle it, though, and an owner meets that number exactly once. The sale price.
Peak Business Valuation values these businesses for a living. It puts moving companies at an average of 2.18x to 3.06x seller’s discretionary earnings, or 3.23x to 4.30x EBITDA. Hold that against the same firm’s published range for a business almost identical in shape. HVAC companies also run trucks, also employ licensed tradespeople, also serve a fragmented local market, also compete on service. Peak puts them at 3.40x to 7.80x EBITDA. The top of the moving range is roughly where the HVAC range begins.
Same appraiser. Same methodology. Same trucks, near enough. The difference is that an HVAC company’s customer calls them again, on a service agreement, for twenty years, and a moving company’s customer moves house once every seven years and never learns whose truck it was.
That gap is the price of not owning the customer, expressed as a multiple, and it is structural rather than a judgement on anyone’s crews. Buyers pay for what survives the closing. Reputation that lives in a platform’s review database does not transfer, which is the argument in our piece on who your reviews actually belong to. Neither does demand that arrives through a marketplace login. A customer list transfers. So does a brand people search for by name, and so does a channel that keeps producing after the founder stops answering the phone: the most valuable thing on the balance sheet and the least likely to appear on it.
An operator can be busier every year and worth less every year at the same time. The profit and loss statement hides that. The multiple does not.
Hotels already ran this experiment
In July 2005, priceline.com paid €109 million, about $132 million, for a Dutch company called Bookings B.V. It is a boring 8-K. Two decades later, Booking Holdings reports $186.1 billion in gross travel bookings, 1.2 billion room nights and a 20.1% net income margin. Hotels did not lose the ability to run hotels during those twenty years. They lost the first conversation with the guest.
The bill for that is published. Skift Research estimated that hotels would pay intermediaries more than $75 billion in 2023, including roughly $50 billion in commissions and markups to the largest booking sites and bed banks. Hoteliers have spent the better part of two decades and enormous brand budgets trying to claw the relationship back, and here is where that fight stood: in 2024, booking sites took $266 billion of hotel gross bookings against $262 billion booked direct. After twenty years of effort, a coin flip.
The thing worth taking from that is not the size of the numbers. It is the shape of the timeline. Nothing dramatic happened in any single year. A hotel took some extra bookings from a website, then a few more, then found one day that most of its demand came through a channel it did not control and could not switch off. We have told the full version of that story elsewhere, including the rate-parity clauses and the regulators who eventually struck them down.
Why the conditions are right now
Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory, written in 2015, describes what happens when transaction costs fall to zero: distribution stops being scarce, the party that owns the customer relationship sets the terms, and, in his words, “suppliers can be commoditized.” He lists hotels as a case where brand trust was once integrated with vacant rooms. It was not a prediction about moving. It reads like one.
Every precondition that story needs is present in moving today, and each one is measurable. Supply is fragmented: 9,430 US moving companies with low market share concentration, by IBISWorld’s own reading, and no brand a consumer would name unprompted. Supply is also growing faster than demand. FMCSA counted 3,472 active household goods motor carriers in 2014 and 4,297 in 2019, a 4.36% annual increase. Buyers comparison-shop under time pressure, at the most stressful moment of their year. This is exactly the buying condition a comparison site is built for. The sale starts online. And the industry is a small, high-friction corner of something enormous: global logistics spending was $9.4 trillion in 2024 and is forecast at $23.0 trillion by 2035, on MarketsandMarkets’ numbers. Capital goes looking for spreads like that.
The last precondition is the one nobody can outsource. Incumbents have to treat third-party demand as bonus revenue rather than as a competitor for the customer. Hotels did that for years. Movers are doing it now, and the search data that would prove it belongs to the marketplace, not to the operator.
What owning the customer would actually mean
Not much of this industry’s conversation is about the alternative, so it is worth defining it precisely. Owning the customer is not a slogan and not a piece of software. It is four things, and an operator either has them or does not.
The enquiry arrives with your name already on it. Somebody searched for your company, or was told your company’s name by a person they trust, and the first conversation is with you. Not with a shortlist you were placed on. The ratio of demand that arrives that way is the single most diagnostic number in the business, and most operators have never calculated it.
The data belongs to you. Who asked, what they asked for, what you quoted, what they paid, why the ones who said no said no. Not aggregated into someone else’s dashboard. Yours, on your side of the wall, going back years.
The reputation attaches to you. When the job goes well, the customer knows whose truck it was. The review lands somewhere that helps you win the next one, rather than helping a platform win the next twelve.
The next move comes back. The relocation in seven years, the office move, the sister-in-law. That is the part that compounds, and it is the part fulfilment work can never produce, because a customer cannot come back to a company they were never introduced to. That distinction is why more operators are quietly becoming fulfilment businesses without ever deciding to, and why the ones going the other way are rebuilding themselves around owned demand instead.
So, back to the question at the top. Your revenue is up and you are making less money than you did ten years ago because you kept the half of the business that costs money to run and gradually gave away the half that compounds. The trucks, the crews, the licenses, the claims, the fuel and the risk are all still yours. The customer relationship, the data, the reputation and the repeat booking increasingly belong to whoever met the customer first. Revenue measures how much work you did. It has never measured how much of it was yours.
For most of human history, a name and a craft were the same fact: people walked to the village blacksmith’s forge because it was his, not because they searched for a category called blacksmithing. Anonymity between a customer and the person who actually serves them is a recent invention, and it did not arrive because customers wanted it. It arrived because someone else found it profitable to stand in the middle and collect a toll on every introduction. The operator who no longer owns his customer’s memory of his own name has not lost something new; he has had something ancient quietly taken back.
Worth asking, before the next season starts: of last year’s revenue, how much came from a customer who would say your company’s name if someone asked them who moved them?
