957 home-service companies were bought by individuals last year. Nobody was counting.

Someone buys the plumbing company you have used for twenty years. If the buyer is an investor group, there is an announcement: a press release, a line in a deal tracker, a page on the group's website. Parity's record is built from those. If the buyer is a person, there is usually nothing. A bank loan closes, the trucks stay the same, and the only people who know are the two who signed.

Except the loan is public. The Small Business Administration guarantees most of these purchases through its 7(a) program, and it publishes every loan it guarantees: the business's name and address, the lender, the amount, the trade, and whether the money financed the purchase of an existing business. The file is updated every quarter and rarely reported on.

I read it.

What it says

In the SBA's 2025 fiscal year, October 2024 through September 2025, 957 home-service companies in the United States were bought by individual owners with SBA-backed loans, for a combined $1.05 billion. That is up from 520 purchases in fiscal 2020, an increase of 84 percent in five years. The dollar total has doubled.

These are not investor groups. The SBA guarantees these loans only for small businesses, and when it decides whether a business is small it counts the other companies its owners control. A group that already owns a hundred plumbing companies is not small. Every purchase in this file is a person, or a few people, buying a business to run it.

Where

Florida led with 129 purchases, then Texas (80), California (61), Colorado (50) and North Carolina (39). Pennsylvania had 35, New York 28, New Jersey 18. Tap a state for its number.

Which trades

HVAC, plumbing and electrical, the trades investor groups have bought most heavily, are also where the most individual buyers are. Pest control and garage doors, two trades where investor-backed groups have been especially active, saw only 15 and 17 individual purchases all year.

Who lends

Three banks made nearly a third of these loans: The Huntington National Bank (148), Live Oak Banking Company (93), First Internet Bank of Indiana (60). If you want to know who is buying local home-service companies to run them, those banks' loan officers know before anyone else does.

Franchise or not

882 of the 957 companies bought were independent names. 75 were franchise locations, a Monster Tree Service or CertaPro Painters territory, where the buyer owns the location and a larger company owns the brand. Parity lists a franchise owner the same way: the owner's name, the brand, and who owns the brand.

The other half of the picture

Parity's Ownership Record lists 1,749 local companies bought by 208 investor groups, each with a source you can open. 91 of those purchases carry a 2025 date; most entries have no date at all, because the buyer never announced one. The record is a floor, not a count of every deal, and it grows every day.

The SBA file is the opposite. It is complete, because every guaranteed loan is in it, and silent about any purchase made without one.

Put side by side, the two show the same market from both ends. Hundreds of local companies change hands each year to people who will run them. Others go to groups that will run them from somewhere else: Parity's record shows 91 such purchases dated 2025, and most of its entries carry no date at all. Both kinds keep the name on the truck. Parity's job is to let you tell which is which.

If you are one of the 957

You bought a company whose website probably still says family-owned since whenever. That line is now about the family before you, and nothing on the site tells your customers that the owner who answers the phone is you. A verified listing on Parity says you own and run it, with your name on it, confirmed by us. It is free, and it takes five minutes: list your business.

Method

Source: the SBA's 7(a) FOIA data, fiscal 2020 to present, as of 2026-06-30, from data.sba.gov. "Home-service" is 24 industry codes: plumbing, heating and air-conditioning, and electrical contractors; roofing, siding and glass; residential remodelers and the finishing trades; landscaping; pest control; remediation; septic; cleaning and other building services; appliance repair; security systems; and the SBA's catch-all for other specialty trades (pools, fences, paving, excavation), which is included for completeness and is the least precise. A "purchase" is a loan the SBA marks "Change of Ownership". Cancelled loans are left out. Dollar figures are gross approvals. Fiscal years run October to September; fiscal 2026 covers October 2025 to June 2026 only (588 purchases so far, $642 million). The script that produces every number is available on request, and the next quarter's file is due in late October.