The 2026 State of HOA & Community Association Management

Who this is for

You own — or run — a company that manages homeowners associations, condominiums, or common-interest communities. You collect the assessments, chase the delinquencies, sit through the board meetings, dispatch the vendors, and carry the late-night call when a pipe bursts in Building C.

You did not get into this business because you love reserve studies. You got into it because somewhere along the line you were good at solving other people's problems, and people kept paying you to keep solving them.

This brief is for you. Not for the board. Not for the homeowner. For the operator.

It covers four things most owners in this industry never get a straight answer on:

1. What the numbers actually look like across the industry right now — margins, firm counts, the demand picture.
2. The consolidation wave — who is buying, what they're paying, and why it matters even if you never plan to sell.
3. The succession gap — the single biggest force quietly setting the price of your company.
4. What your company is actually worth, and the levers that move that number.

Where a figure is a hard data point, we cite it. Where it's an estimate or a range drawn from the data, we say so plainly. We would rather under-claim than have you catch us inflating a number — because if we lose your trust on page two, nothing else in here matters.

Part 1 — The numbers, straight

Let's start with the size and shape of the industry, because most owners operate inside it for decades without ever seeing it from above.

There are two different worlds living under the "association management" umbrella, and they behave very differently.

The associations themselves — the HOAs and condo associations as legal entities — are a large, stable, slightly shrinking universe. According to IBISWorld's Homeowners' Associations in the US report (NAICS 52378, updated October 2025):

• The associations collectively run roughly $38.5 billion in revenue (assessments, fees, special charges).
• Average profit margin ~16% at the association level.
• Roughly 17,700 enterprises, and that count has been declining about 1.2% per year over the long run — associations consolidating into larger communities and shared-service arrangements.
• About 138,000 people employed across them.

The management firms — companies like yours that manage these communities under contract — sit inside the broader IBISWorld Property Management category (NAICS 53404, updated November 2025), which is much larger and rental-heavy:

• Roughly $137 billion in revenue across the full property-management category.
• Average profit margin ~10.3% at the firm level (industry-wide; note this blends rental managers and association managers together).
• A very large and fragmented field — hundreds of thousands of establishments, the vast majority small and owner-operated.

The honest read on demand: this is not a hot-growth industry, and you already know that. What it is — and this is the part that's underpriced — is a mandatory, recurring, recession-resistant one. The homes don't stop needing management when rates rise. The assessments still have to be collected. The board still has to meet. IBISWorld's own outlook for the association sector flags the tailwinds plainly: retiring baby boomers driving demand for service-oriented associations, aging infrastructure and stricter reserve requirements driving dues up, and local governments shifting more responsibility onto associations (privatized service models). Rising dues and rising compliance burden both mean more work that has to be managed by someone — which is to say, by you.

That's the quiet strength of this business: nobody wakes up excited about it, the customer is legally and practically captive, and the revenue shows up every single month.

Part 2 — The consolidation wave: who's buying, and at what price

Here is the development that most independent owners feel but can't quite name: private capital has discovered association management, and it is buying.

For most of this industry's history, the buyers of a small management company were other local managers — one operator buying another's book for a modest multiple of the management fees. That world still exists at the very bottom. But above it, a different kind of buyer has moved in, and they pay differently.

The national platforms

The two names every owner should know:

• FirstService Residential — the residential arm of FirstService Corporation, the largest community-association manager in North America. They run a dual model: a management arm plus a branded-services arm that sells back into the communities they manage. They are the proof of the full thesis at scale — when you control the management contract, you control the community's entire vendor spend.
• Associa — the other national giant, built almost entirely through acquisition over decades.

These platforms generally buy at the larger end — books with real scale. Industry practice puts the floor for a FirstService-grade tuck-in at roughly $5 million in revenue or above (our estimate from market structure; treat as directional, not a published cutoff). Associa likewise concentrates on larger operators. Which means: if your firm is below that line, the national giants are not your buyer — but they are setting the reference price.

The private-equity-backed regional consolidators

This is the newer, more aggressive force, and the one most relevant to a $600K–$3M owner:

• Continuum Community Living / Continuum (private-equity backed, CIVC Partners) has been actively rolling up Northeast association managers. Our analysis shows Continuum completing on the order of a dozen Northeast acquisitions in 2024, concentrated in exactly the small-to-mid band — roughly 80-community / $1–3M-revenue operators — across Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and down toward Virginia. (These figures come from our analysis; we flag them as our research estimate, not a press-release tally, and an owner doing diligence should confirm specifics directly.)
• RealManage, Associa, and others continue programmatic acquisition campaigns nationally.

What they pay

This is the number every owner wants and few get straight. From comparable transactions and our market research:

• Small, owner-dependent books still change hands in the roughly 3x–5x SDE range (seller's discretionary earnings) when the buyer is another operator and the owner is the business.
• Platform and consolidator deals on scaled, manager-run books trade meaningfully higher — into the mid-to-high single digits on EBITDA, with the strongest strategic deals reaching low double digits. Our research notes a ~5x–9x range as the working band for Continuum-style platform deals, with the very best-positioned books pushing the top of that.

Why this matters even if you never sell: the consolidators are not just buyers, they're competitors with a checkbook. When Continuum or a PE-backed regional buys two firms in your county, they get density, shared back-office, and pricing power you can't match alone. The window where an independent in an un-swept market commands a premium — because a consolidator wants the territory and you're the way in — does not stay open forever. In markets the consolidators haven't reached yet, an independent commands a premium precisely because a platform wants the territory and the local firm is the way in. Markets close. The owner who understands the wave can ride it; the one who ignores it gets passed by it.

Part 3 — The succession gap (the force setting your price)

Now the part nobody at the trade conference says out loud.

A very large share of this industry is owned by people who started their firms in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s — and who are now at or past retirement age with no successor in place.

We don't have a single clean published statistic for "percentage of HOA-management owners over 60 with no succession plan" — so we won't pretend to. What we can point to is the structural picture the data paints:

• The association universe itself is shrinking in enterprise count (~1.2%/yr per IBISWorld 52378) — a classic signature of founders aging out and consolidating rather than new entrants flooding in.
• The management field is dominated by small, owner-operated firms where the founder is the relationship — the person the boards actually trust.
• The naming convention tells the story: a huge fraction of these firms carry the founder's surname or a "founded 19xx" / "family owned since" badge on the website. In adjacent owner-operated service industries, a founder's-name-as-company-name plus a 1970s–90s founding date is one of the most reliable proxies for an owner who is 60+ and has no obvious exit. (This is a pattern-recognition signal we watch for — offered here as a lens, not a hard census figure.)

Here is why this should change how you think about your own company: in an industry full of aging owners with no successor, the supply of motivated sellers is rising faster than the supply of qualified buyers who can run the book without the founder. That imbalance does two things at once:

1. It puts downward pressure on the price of an owner-dependent firm — because a buyer looking at a company that walks out the door with you has to discount for the risk that the boards leave when you do.
2. It puts upward pressure on the price of a firm that runs without its founder — because that's the rare, scarce asset every consolidator actually wants.

The succession gap isn't a threat hanging over you. It's a sorting mechanism. It's quietly deciding, right now, which side of that 3x-vs-8x line your company falls on. And unlike the market, that part you control.

Part 4 — What your company is actually worth (and the levers that move it)

Most owners value their company one of two wrong ways: they either anchor on a rule of thumb they heard once ("two times management fees"), or they assume it's worth whatever they personally would need to retire. Neither is how a real buyer thinks.

Here's how a real buyer — operator, consolidator, or PE — actually values an association-management company.

Step 1 — They normalize earnings to SDE or EBITDA. They take your net profit and add back the owner's salary, perks, one-time costs, and anything personal running through the business. That "seller's discretionary earnings" number — not your revenue, not your fees — is what gets multiplied. If you've been running the business to minimize taxable income, you may be hiding the very number that determines your price. Worth fixing before you ever take a call.

Step 2 — They pick a multiple, and the multiple is mostly about risk. Same earnings, wildly different price, depending on the answers to a short list of questions:

Step 3 — The churn reality. Be honest with yourself here, because a buyer will be: association-management contracts are typically 30-to-90-day terminable, boards turn over annually, and real-world account churn in this industry runs in the range of roughly 5–10% per year (our working estimate from market research; your own number may be better or worse and is one of the first things a buyer will measure). That terminability is the defining risk of the asset class — it's why this business is a social and operational moat, not a contractual one. The firms that command premium prices are the ones that have engineered stickiness despite the terminable contract: deep portfolio-manager relationships, responsiveness the board can't bear to lose, switching costs measured in pain.

The five levers, in plain English — what to do in the 12–36 months before you ever sell:

1. Get yourself out of the relationship. Every board that renews because of a portfolio manager instead of you is worth real money at exit. This is the highest-value work you can do, and it takes the longest — start now.
2. Paper your contracts. Convert handshakes and month-to-month arrangements to written, multi-year terms wherever a board will sign. Every year of contracted term de-risks the buyer and lifts the multiple.
3. Diversify the book. A buyer pays less for a firm where losing one anchor association tanks the P&L. Spread the risk.
4. Clean the financials. Separate the personal from the business, document your SDE add-backs, and make the earnings legible. You cannot get paid for profit a buyer can't see.
5. Systematize. The more of "how this firm runs" lives in software and documented process instead of your memory, the more transferable — and valuable — it is.

None of these require you to sell. Every one of them makes the company worth more and easier to run whether you sell next year or in ten. That's the rare kind of work that pays you twice.

Where the data in this brief comes from

We believe in showing our sources, because a number with no provenance is just an opinion in a suit.

• Industry size, margins, firm counts, demand drivers: IBISWorld, Homeowners' Associations in the US (NAICS 52378, updated October 2025) and Property Management in the US (NAICS 53404, updated November 2025). The $38.5B / 16% margin / ~17,700-firm / -1.2%-CAGR figures are the association report; the ~$137B / ~10.3% margin figures are the broader property-management report.
• Consolidation, named buyers, multiple ranges, consolidation timing: Planet's Problems research and analysis, drawn from comparable-transaction analysis and market research on FirstService Residential, Associa, Continuum (CIVC), and RealManage. We have flagged throughout where a figure is our research estimate rather than a published statistic.
• Succession and owner-age signals: structural inference from the IBISWorld enterprise-decline data plus owner-operated industry patterns. We deliberately did not invent a precise "X% of owners are 60+ with no plan" statistic, because we don't have one we'd stand behind.

If any figure here doesn't match what you see in your own market, trust your own market — and tell us. We'd genuinely like to know.

Owner's guides — go deeper

• What is your HOA management company worth? — what actually sets the multiple, and the 3x-vs-8x line.
• Who's buying HOA management companies? — the consolidators, their model, and what their offers really price in.
• The succession gap — why an aging-founder industry is quietly setting your price, and the part you control.
• How to sell — without listing it — the three exits, the private-sale sequence, and why structure beats sticker price.
• What happens to your team when you sell? — consolidator vs. private buyer, and the clauses that protect your people.
• Should you sell in 2026 — or wait? — the honest timing read: market cycle, your firm, and you.
• What multiple do these firms sell for? — the honest 2026 SDE/EBITDA ranges and what moves you up them.

This brief is general industry intelligence, not financial, legal, or valuation advice for any specific company. Every business is different; the only way to know what yours is worth is a real diligence process. We'd be happy to point you toward one.