Five minutes of QuickBooks read-only and a few quick questions surfaces what a buyer would discount your home inspection firm for — how much of the inspecting and the agent relationships only you can do, how concentrated your referral sources are, and whether ancillary and commercial work give the book any durability. Preview is free; $499 for the full memo.
Enter two numbers for an instant Home Inspection ballpark. No signup — the real number comes from your books.
We answer each one from your books first — so you fix the story before a diligence team writes the number.
In most home-inspection firms the owner performs the inspections and personally holds the agent relationships that feed them. A buyer sees a job that ends when you stop showing up — not a transferable business. An owner who does most of the inspecting and brings in most of the referrals is the single biggest discount in this trade, because both the capacity and the pipeline walk at close.
Home-inspection demand flows through real-estate agents and brokerages, and if one agent or office sends an outsized share of the work, a buyer prices the risk that the relationship cools or moves to a competitor. This is channel concentration, and it's underwritten like a sales-channel risk: lose the referrer and a chunk of revenue goes with them.
Most inspections are triggered by a residential transaction, so your top line tracks home-sale counts — and falls in a slow-sales year. A buyer normalizes a peak-transaction year back to the cycle rather than crediting it, and looks for commercial, relocation, and re-inspection work that doesn't depend on resale velocity.
Home inspection carries real professional-liability exposure — most states now require inspector E&O coverage, and a missed-defect claim can follow the business. A buyer wants current licensing, a documented E&O policy, and a clean claims history; an unquantified liability tail or a lapsed credential is a line they'll haircut until you've documented it.
Each lever is sized for a typical $700k–$1.5m revenue multi-inspector home-inspection firm, transaction + ancillary/commercial mix — about $300K EBITDA. Same number whether we frame it as “what a buyer discounts” or “what you keep by fixing it.”
Broaden the agent and brokerage base so no single referrer is load-bearing, and add high-margin ancillary services (radon, sewer-scope, thermal, IAQ) plus commercial, relocation, and warranty re-inspection accounts. It makes revenue more durable than one-time resale inspections and less hostage to any one referral source — the clearest path toward the top of the range.
adds about 0.3–0.5× to your multiple · usually takes 12–18 months
Recruit and certify inspectors, put scheduling and client communication on a real platform with a coordinator running it, and move the agent relationships off your personal phone. A firm that inspects and books work without the owner stops being 'a job,' which is what opens the larger buyer pool and lets the multiple climb toward an EBITDA basis.
adds about 0.4–0.7× to your multiple · usually takes 12–24 months
Clean accrual books with revenue split by service line and referral source, current state licensing, a documented E&O policy with a clean claims record, and a documented add-back trail let a buyer trust the earnings and the liability picture — which protects the price from a mid-diligence re-trade.
adds about 0.1–0.3× to your multiple · usually takes 3–6 months
Typical impact ranges blended from lower-middle-market transaction data, sub-$50M M&A databases, and observed consolidator pricing in the $300K–$3M EBITDA band. Directional, not a guarantee — your memo computes your actual numbers from your books.
The metrics buyers grade home inspection firms on. The diagnostic fills the “your business” column from your actual QuickBooks data.
| Metric | Home Inspection benchmark | Your business | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recurring / contracted revenue | ~12% of revenue | Your data | Higher is better — the top multiple lever |
| Gross margin | ~70% | Your data | Pricing and job-costing discipline |
| EBITDA margin | ~28% | Your data | What flows to the bottom line |
| Healthy customer-concentration ceiling | top customer under 15% | Your data | Above it, buyers price the risk |
| Typical industry growth | ~3% / yr | Your data | Beating it can add to your multiple |
| Typical sale multiple | 3.0–5.5× EBITDA | Your data | Where the bidding starts; the levers above move you up |
Benchmarks are blended industry composites, service businesses $1M–$10M revenue, 2026-Q1 — directional, not a precise bar. Your memo measures you against your own books. Connect QuickBooks to fill in your numbers →
The diagnostic arrives as formats you can actually use, plus a private, scoped link to share a curated package with a specific buyer — you decide, card by card, what they see.
A branded slide deck, ready to present — for the buyer meeting, the lender, or the board.
A written diagnostic that holds up with buyers, yours to edit — plain-English summary, how we rebuilt your real earnings, every add-back listed.
Live formulas, not a dead printout — the path from raw profit to your real number, plus the cash-tied-up scenarios a buyer can stress-test.
Home inspection is a fragmented, light-asset professional service, so buyers split sharply by size. Owner-operated, single-inspector firms sell mostly to individual and SBA-backed buyers, who price the business largely on the owner's own relationships and inspection capacity. Multi-inspector, manager-run firms attract regional consolidators and the national franchise systems — Pillar To Post (part of FirstService Brands), WIN Home Inspection, HouseMaster, and AmeriSpec among them — that value a diversified referral base and a transferable roster. What separates the two ends is whether the inspecting, scheduling, and agent relationships run without the founder. The memo maps which buyer would look at a firm your size and how each structures the deal.
Read-only, through Intuit. We never write to your books. About 5 minutes.
Just what the books can’t show — agreements, key accounts, who runs the crews.
Buyer-readiness score, normalized EBITDA, value range and top flags — instantly.
The full engine, all three deliverables, the dashboard and the buyer deal room.
Start with the free preview. Pay once — $499 — only when you want the full memo. No subscription, no per-seat pricing.
Most Home Inspection businesses in the $1M–$10M revenue range trade at roughly 3.0× to 5.5× normalized EBITDA, with a typical deal near 4.0×. Smaller, owner-dependent shops sit at the low end; larger, manager-run businesses with recurring revenue reach the top. Your actual number depends on your books — that's what the diagnostic computes, blending recent lower-middle-market closings, main-street marketplace sales, and academic M&A survey data.
A home-inspection valuation begins where a buyer's QoE team begins: your reported earnings as the starting line. From there, the normalizing adjustments — owner add-backs, the cost of a replacement lead inspector, family wages, personal vehicle use, one-time items — each tied to a specific QuickBooks transaction, producing your normalized EBITDA. Against that we apply a multiple grounded in recent small-business sale transactions in the category. The factors that move it up or down: how much of the inspecting and the referral relationships only you can do, referral-channel concentration, home-sale-cycle exposure, the ancillary/commercial/relocation mix that adds durability, and whether licensing and E&O are clean and transferable. Every figure traces back to your books — never a revenue rule-of-thumb.
A diversified referral base no single agent or brokerage controls, a roster of certified inspectors so the owner isn't the only one in the field, a coordinator who books work without the owner, a high-margin ancillary-service attach plus commercial and relocation accounts, and clean books with current licensing and a documented E&O record. The diagnostic scores where you sit on each and shows what moving up would be worth.
Sixty seconds. Four numbers. No signup, no email. Just a real answer.