What is a property management company worth? Per-door figures versus earnings multiples

The rest of this guide covers where published multiples come from, which earnings measure fits a company your size, and why the per-door numbers you hear from peers, buyers, and websites are so hard to compare. Nothing here is a valuation of your company, and none of it is legal, tax, or financial advice.

How do buyers actually price a property management company?

Buyers price the cash flow they expect to keep after you leave. They start from earnings, adjust for anything that will not continue under new ownership, and apply a multiple that reflects risk: how likely the earnings are to hold, how much they depend on you, and how many buyers are competing for the business. A per-door figure is what you get when you divide the final price by the number of doors. It is an output of that process, not an input to it.

The most regularly published view of private-company multiples by size is the Market Pulse survey from the International Business Brokers Association and M&A Source. For the second quarter of 2026, 255 business brokers and M&A advisors reported on 181 completed transactions across all industries (IBBA and M&A Source, August 2026). Reported multiples rose with deal size, from 2.0 times SDE for deals under $500,000 to 5.8 times EBITDA for deals between $5 million and $50 million. The survey does not publish how many deals fall in each size band, and it does not report multiples for property management, so read it as a picture of how size changes the multiple, not as a price list for your company.

A second source covers a different population. GF Data collects deal data from private equity firms on sponsor-backed acquisitions between $1 million and $500 million of enterprise value. Its contributors reported 85 completed transactions in the second quarter of 2026 at an average of 7.0 times trailing twelve-month adjusted EBITDA, down from 7.3 times in the first quarter (GF Data, August 27, 2026). Those are private equity buyers, all industries, and a much wider size range, so the figure is not comparable line for line with the Market Pulse bands.

Should my company be valued on SDE or EBITDA?

It depends mostly on size, and on who is likely to buy. The two measures differ in one important way: how they treat your pay.

• SDE (seller’s discretionary earnings) is profit before income taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization, non-recurring items, personal expenses paid by the business, and one owner’s entire compensation, including benefits. It answers the question: what does this business produce for one full-time owner-operator?
• Adjusted EBITDA starts from the same place but replaces the owner’s actual pay with what it would cost to hire someone at market rate to do the owner’s job. It answers a different question: what does the business earn after paying someone to run it?

Both definitions follow the IBBA glossary. Because SDE keeps the owner’s salary inside earnings, it is the larger number for the same company, so a multiple of SDE and a multiple of EBITDA are not interchangeable. Market Pulse reports multiples of SDE for deals under $2 million in purchase price and multiples of EBITDA from $2 million up. That split tracks who tends to buy at each size. In the survey’s full-year 2023 tally, first-time buyers made 44% of acquisitions under $2 million and people who had owned a business before made another 35%; between $2 million and $50 million, individual buyers made 36% and private equity 23% (Market Pulse Q4 2023 report). An individual who will run the company personally cares what it pays its owner. A company or investor that will hire a manager cares what is left after paying one.

The mistake to avoid is mixing the two. An EBITDA multiple applied to SDE overstates value, because it pays a multiple on your salary as if it were profit the new owner keeps. When a peer says their company sold for a certain multiple, the first question is: a multiple of what? EBITDA multiples explained walks through what moves the multiple itself, and what is my business worth covers how a buyer builds a figure from normalized earnings. Getting from your tax return to defensible SDE or EBITDA is its own job, which is the subject of preparing clean financials.

Why do per-door figures disagree so widely?

Look up what a property management company is worth per door and the answers vary enormously. Two labelled examples, neither of which is data:

• A 2025 industry newsletter recalls that, roughly a decade earlier, conventional wisdom held that a company would sell for about $1,000 per door.
• The same newsletter summarizes a paid report that Peter Lohmann compiled from 89 voluntarily submitted closed deals over five years. The highest exceeded $8,000 per door. The writer notes the collection suffers from self-selection bias and has no calculable margin of error.

Each of these can be accurate for the deal or book of business it describes and still tell you little about yours. Here is why.

Residential, multifamily, and association management are different businesses

A door means something different in each segment. In residential rental management, clients can be individual investors who each own a few homes, and where the fee is tied to rent collected, revenue per door rises and falls with local rents and the fee schedule. In multifamily, a single client can own hundreds of units, so one decision can move a large block of doors at once.

Community association management sits further apart again. In an October 2025 benchmarking survey of 94 association management companies, 65% said they charge a flat monthly fee per association and 39% said they price per door or unit, with firms free to select more than one model (Foundation for Community Association Research). When the fee is set per association, dividing a price by doors produces a number that says little about the business. Revenue mix matters as well. FirstService Residential, which describes itself as the North American leader in residential property management, reported that property management fees were 16% of its $2.3 billion of 2025 revenue, with on-site services at 56%, pool and amenity management at 18%, and transaction services at 10% (FirstService investor presentation, July 2026). A per-door figure for a company like that folds every one of those services into the price.

Revenue per door and fee structure

Two companies can manage the same number of doors and earn very different revenue from them. Management fees are one layer; leasing, renewal, maintenance coordination, and other charges sit on top. In the same association survey, 24% of firms said ancillary services made up 31% or more of revenue, 16% said 5% or less, and 13% did not track it. If one company earns twice the revenue per door of another at the same margin, paying the same price per door means paying half the earnings multiple for the first company. The per-door figure hides that difference completely.

Margins

Revenue per door is still not profit per door. Pricing, staffing, software, and how much work each door generates decide how much of the revenue survives. The association survey shows how wide that spread can be: 16% of firms reported operating margins (EBIT or EBITDA) of 20% or more, 10% reported 0 to 5%, 1% reported a loss, and a third chose not to answer. A buyer paying a multiple of earnings will pay very different amounts per door for companies at opposite ends of that range.

Contract terms: cancellation and assignment

Management agreements are what a buyer is really acquiring, and their terms shape how much of the revenue is likely to stay. Short notice periods are normal even at scale. In its annual information form for 2025, FirstService describes its residential management contracts as typically running one to three years but generally cancellable by either party on 30 to 90 days’ notice, while reporting a mid-90% retention rate (filed as Exhibit 1 to Form 40-F). In the association survey, half of firms reported client retention of 98% or better over the prior 12 months, and another 26% reported 95% to 97%. Those are self-reported figures, which is exactly why a buyer will diligence your actual retention history rather than take comfort from contract wording.

Assignment is the second issue. In an asset sale, each agreement has to move to the buyer, and some agreements require the property owner’s or the board’s consent to do that. Where managing property for others requires a real estate license, licensing and trust account rules can also affect how the transfer is structured. Read your assignment and termination clauses before anyone quotes you a number, and ask your attorney how they apply in your state and to your deal structure.

Owner dependence

If property owners stay because of their relationship with you, a buyer has to price the risk that some of them leave when you do. That can show up as a lower multiple, a holdback tied to door retention, or an earnout. It also makes per-door comparisons misleading, because two books with the same door count can carry very different risk depending on whom the clients actually trust. Owner-dependent business valuation covers how to reduce that risk before a sale.

Price per door of what?

A per-door number rarely says what was bought or how it was paid. It might describe a bundle of management contracts folded into the buyer’s existing office, where the buyer adds little overhead, or a whole company with staff, systems, and a lease. It might count doors on the day the letter of intent was signed, or only the doors still under management after a retention period. It might include deferred or contingent payments that were never fully earned (seller financing and earnouts explains how those work). And behind every per-door price sits an implied multiple of revenue and of earnings that the headline does not show. Without those details, the figure cannot be compared with anything.

Small samples

Most per-door figures circulate from one deal, one buyer’s offer, or a handful of transactions someone chose to share. Even the dedicated deal collection above was self-selected. The broad surveys have limits of their own: Market Pulse does not publish its sample size by deal-size band and does not isolate property management. A number repeated often enough starts to sound like a benchmark without ever becoming one.

How should you use a per-door figure, then?

As a sanity check, not a price. If a buyer’s offer or a peer’s story works out to a per-door figure, convert it back into what it implies: a multiple of your revenue, and more importantly a multiple of your normalized SDE or EBITDA. If that implied multiple sits far above or below what survey data shows for companies your size, something in the comparison is different, and it is worth finding out what.

Before you rely on any figure, know these numbers for your own company:

• Doors by type. Single-family, small and large multifamily, associations, and commercial, counted the same way every month.
• Revenue per door, split. Recurring management fees separately from leasing, renewal, maintenance, and other fees.
• Door history. Doors added and lost each year, and why the lost ones left.
• Contract terms. Term, notice period, any termination fees, and assignment language.
• Concentration. The share of revenue from your largest owners or associations.
• Normalized earnings. SDE and adjusted EBITDA, with every add-back documented.

These are the same items a buyer will ask for in diligence. Our guide to selling a property management company explains how each one moves value, and our page on M&A advisory for property management companies covers what buyers in this sector look for.

So what is your company worth?

Start with normalized earnings, choose the measure that fits your size, and apply a multiple that reflects how durable those earnings are: retention, contract terms, revenue mix, margins, concentration, and how much of it depends on you. Use per-door figures to check the result, not to set it. When the two disagree, the explanation is in the details a per-door number leaves out.

If you would like that worked through on your actual numbers, start with a confidential valuation. It is a private conversation about what your company is worth and why, with no obligation to sell.

Sources

• IBBA and M&A Source, “Market Pulse Survey Q2 2026 Highlights,” August 2026 (survey fielded July 1 to 15, 2026; 255 respondents; 181 transactions; per-band sample sizes not disclosed). ibba.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/mp-highlights-q2-2026.pdf
• IBBA and M&A Source, “The Market Pulse Survey Q2 2026 Reports the Latest Trends in Business Sales up to $50M,” press release, August 25, 2026. prnewswire.com
• IBBA and M&A Source, Market Pulse Survey executive report, Q4 2023, published February 2024 (buyer types for full-year 2023). ibba.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/mp_q4_2023_executive-report.pdf
• GF Data, “GF Data Reports Show Steady Middle-Market Deal Flow Amid More Selective Financing Conditions in Q2,” August 27, 2026 (85 private equity-sponsored transactions in Q2 2026). acg.org
• International Business Brokers Association, Glossary, entries for Discretionary Earnings and Adjusted EBITDA, accessed October 13, 2026. ibba.org/resource-center/glossary
• Foundation for Community Association Research, “Community Association Management Company Benchmarking Survey,” October 2025 (94 respondents, self-reported). foundation.caionline.org
• FirstService Corporation, Investor Presentation, July 2026. firstservice.com
• FirstService Corporation, Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2025, dated February 20, 2026, filed as Exhibit 1 to Form 40-F. sec.gov
• Labelled example only, not data: Todd Ortscheid, “Beyond the Rumors: Real Numbers in Property Management M&A,” PMAssist, May 27, 2025, summarizing a paid report by Peter Lohmann. pmassist.substack.com