For the past two years, many owners in HVAC, MEP, energy services, and facility services made the same decision: wait.
Rising interest rates. Uncertain deal activity. Conflicting advice from peers and advisors. For many, pressing pause in 2023 and 2024 felt prudent.
Now, as we enter 2026, the environment looks different.
Interest rates have largely stabilized. Buyers are active again. Transactions are closing. But that has led to a new and more important question:
Is my business actually worth more now than it was a year or two ago?
The answer is not as straightforward as many owners expect.
What Really Happened to Multiples in 2025
Despite the headlines, valuations did not collapse across the board.
What we saw in 2025 was a reset and a clear separation between high-quality and average businesses.
Across the built environment, outcomes generally fell into three categories:
- Businesses with clean financials, recurring service revenue, and strong management teams continued to command solid multiples
- Middle-of-the-road companies saw flat or modestly compressed valuations
- Project-heavy or inconsistent earnings profiles experienced meaningful valuation pressure
The takeaway is simple. Buyers did not stop paying for good businesses. They stopped paying for uncertainty.
Multiples became more selective, not extinct.
EBITDA Quality Matters More Than Revenue Growth
One of the most common misconceptions we hear from owners is that revenue growth alone will drive valuation.
That was often true several years ago. It is not true in 2026.
Today’s buyers are focused on how EBITDA is generated, not just how fast the top line grows.
In buyer underwriting models, questions now center on:
- How much EBITDA comes from recurring service, maintenance, or long-term contracts
- How dependent profits are on a few projects, customers, or key individuals
- Whether margins are stable and repeatable
- How transferable earnings are without the owner’s daily involvement
We routinely see businesses with modest growth outperform faster-growing peers because their earnings are cleaner, more predictable, and easier to scale.
Revenue growth still matters. EBITDA quality is what determines the multiple.
Rate Stabilization Changed Activity, Not Standards
Rate stabilization helped bring buyers back to the table. It did not lower expectations.
If anything, underwriting discipline has increased.
Buyers today are modeling transactions with:
- More conservative leverage assumptions
- Greater scrutiny on cash flow conversion
- Less tolerance for aggressive add-backs or adjusted EBITDA
This is not a return to easy-money valuations. It is a return to rational pricing.
Strong businesses continue to generate strong outcomes. Weak fundamentals are exposed faster than ever.
The Double-Edged Sword of Waiting One More Year
Many owners delayed action believing that time alone would improve valuation.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it quietly works against you.
Waiting can help when it is intentional:
- Margins improve through operational changes
- Recurring revenue increases
- Second-layer management is added
- Financial reporting becomes cleaner and more credible
Waiting hurts when none of that happens:
- Revenue concentration increases
- Key customers or employees leave
- Capital expenditures are deferred
- Owner fatigue increases dependency risk
We often meet owners who delayed for two years only to find their valuation is roughly unchanged, while their energy and optionality have declined.
Time only adds value when it is used deliberately.
Why 2026 Is a Year for Benchmarking, Not Guessing
Valuation is not driven by headlines or anecdotes.
It is driven by how buyers would model your business today, under current assumptions, with today’s risk tolerance.
That is why the most effective owners we work with in 2026 are not rushing to sell or blindly waiting.
They are starting with clarity.
An objective valuation benchmark creates a foundation for better decisions. Whether that leads to holding, improving, acquiring, or preparing for an exit, clarity beats speculation every time.