Methodology

hvacrollups is an independent, public record of HVAC private-equity ownership: the platforms, the sponsors behind them, the operating companies they roll up, and the deals that connect them. It is assembled from public filings, press releases, trade reporting, company disclosures, and archived industry publications.

What this dataset is, and what it isn't

The record is a curated, evidence-gated ownership graph: every company, sponsor, deal, and ownership link is added because a source supports it, and we track how well-corroborated each one is. It is not a census. We do not claim to hold every HVAC company or every transaction in the country. Many roll-up deals, especially older ones and small private tuck-ins, are never publicly disclosed, so they are underreported or absent here by nature.

The practical consequence runs in one direction: where our coverage is incomplete, the real numbers are larger than what we show, not smaller. Our counts are a floor on the scale of consolidation, not a ceiling.

How we classify a company: the business-sector axis

A company carrying an "HVAC" tag is not necessarily a contractor a homeowner can call. The tag sweeps in equipment manufacturers (OEMs), distributors, software vendors, and parts suppliers alongside the service firms that actually install and repair systems. To keep the picture accurate, every company is classified by what its business does:

• Service contractor: a firm whose business is installing, servicing, and repairing HVAC (and adjacent home-services) equipment for end customers. This is the group a homeowner actually hires.
• Manufacturer, distributor, software/SaaS, parts supplier, private-equity firm: companies that operate around the service trade rather than performing it.

Our headline consolidation figures are scoped to service contractors: the firms whose ownership actually determines who shows up at your door. Counting every company that merely carries an HVAC tag would inflate the denominator with manufacturers and vendors that were never "local contractors" in the first place. Where a figure is restricted to service contractors, we say so.

What "rolled up" means

We count an operating company as rolled into a consolidation platform when our graph holds an ownership link from that company up to a platform that consolidates multiple operators: technically, when the company is the source of a rolled_up_into relationship. It is a statement about a documented ownership edge, not an inference from a brand looking "corporate."

Why "PE-traceable" is a floor

We label a contractor traceable to a private-equity sponsor only when the chain of ownership links reaches a named PE firm: when an explicit sponsor link (a backed_by edge) connects its platform to a specific fund. We do not guess a sponsor from circumstantial signals.

That discipline makes the PE-traceable count conservative by construction. Explicit sponsor links are sparse, only a few hundred exist across the entire graph, so a platform that is genuinely private-equity-owned but whose sponsor we cannot yet pin to a source carries no backed_by edge and goes uncounted. Every PE-traceable figure on this site should be read as "at minimum," never as a complete tally.

Where the data is partial

We publish the structural record (who owns whom) broadly, but the fields hanging off it are unevenly covered, and we would rather show that plainly than imply a precision we don't have:

• Deal values. Only a minority of deals carry a disclosed price. We never sum them into an industry total: the aggregate would be dominated by the few large, disclosed transactions and is further distorted by manufacturer mega-deals that aren't contractor roll-ups. We cite values one named deal at a time, and every figure is presented as reported by its source, never as an amount we have independently audited.
• Dates. Many transactions have a known year but not a precise date, or no public date at all. Our dated timelines cover a subset of all deals; we describe them as directional, not as a complete chronology.
• Headquarters / geography. A recorded HQ location exists for roughly half of operating companies. Geographic counts describe "the companies whose location we know," not the whole field.
• Ratings and firmographics. Quality and review data exists only for the enriched subset of companies, and the samples are small and non-random. We treat any rating comparison as a signal, never a measurement.

De-duplication

The same company or platform can appear in multiple sources under slightly different names. We merge records where we can verify they are the same entity, and we leave genuine conflicts visible rather than guessing a merge that would erase a real distinction. Some residual duplication is unavoidable; where a deal is a near-duplicate of another, we flag it rather than counting it twice.

Publish-all, badge the corroborated

We publish everything in the record except rows we have actively rejected as inaccurate. Hiding everything we haven't fully confirmed would quietly bias the picture toward the deals with the loudest press. Instead, we publish broadly and tell you exactly how confident we are in each fact.

The verified badge

A verified badge marks a row whose structural facts, who the parties are, the deal type, the ownership relationship, the dates, are corroborated by independent sources. It is a statement about structure, not about money.

reported dollar figures

Deal values and EBITDA multiples are frequently leaked, estimated, or single-sourced. A dollar figure earns the disclosed treatment only when it is officially disclosed and well-corroborated. Every other figure is shown with a visible reported qualifier and never wears the verified badge: we will not launder a single-sourced number into a confirmed fact.

Corrections

This record may contain errors. If something is wrong, a party, a relationship, a figure, contact us and we will correct it. Rejected rows are removed from public view entirely.

hvacrollups is informational and not investment, legal, or financial advice. Reported figures are presented as reported by their sources and are not independently confirmed. See our Legal & Disclaimers page for full terms.