PE Buyers Now Underwrite AI Maturity in HVAC Deals

60%+ of the top 50 home-service companies are PE-backed. HVAC businesses are changing hands at 6-9x EBITDA.

That's the backdrop for every HVAC operator thinking about a 5-10 year exit.

Here's what most operators don't see yet: PE buyers are underwriting AI maturity as a line item in the acquisition.

ServiceTitan's numbers: around 75% of contractors call AI essential to their operation. Only 25% actually use it. That gap is exactly what sophisticated buyers are watching. When a buyer compares two HVAC businesses at similar EBITDA, the one with ServiceTitan integrations, automated dispatch, AI-routed intake, and a Google Ads offline conversion pipe that feeds cost-per-booked-job back to the algorithm carries more value. The other one reads as a manual operation.

PE deal share in HVAC roughly tripled in a single year. The compression is already underway.

What I see in the accounts I run: most HVAC operators at $3M-$8M/yr have Google Ads running and ServiceTitan open in another tab. Almost none have the offline conversion pipe wired - the part where a booked job in ServiceTitan becomes a signal that goes back to Google and tells the algorithm "this type of caller books revenue." That's the lowest-effort AI-maturity proof point a buyer can evaluate during diligence.

An operator who exits without it leaves money twice: once in ROAS because the algorithm is optimizing for form fills instead of booked jobs, and once in multiple because the buyer sees no intelligence layer to underwrite.

The offline conversion pipe takes less than a week to build on ServiceTitan plus Google Ads. The impact on algorithm performance is visible in 30 days. The impact on how a PE buyer reads the operation shows up in the diligence package - as a documented signal loop between field work and ad spend, not a gap they have to close post-acquisition.

That gap is a line item on the offer.