OffDeal, a tech-enabled investment bank, has launched a landscaping practice to help owners capitalize on record buyer demand for a limited pool of quality businesses.
The practice is led by Varun Agarwal, formerly of J.P. Morgan, with senior support from Ori Eldarov, OffDeal’s CEO and head of M&A, and Alec Shimell, formerly of Macquarie Group. The team has met with more than 95 percent of the major consolidators active in residential and commercial landscaping over the past year — strategic acquirers, private equity platforms and family offices — to map the market and understand what’s driving valuations.
The U.S. is home to roughly 700,000 landscaping businesses.
“Fewer than one in 200 meet institutional buyer criteria,” says Agarwal. “And even within that group, buyer preferences vary wildly — some invest strictly in residential, others only in commercial. Some require a self-perform model, others prefer subcontractors. Getting in front of the wrong buyer doesn’t just mean a lower offer — it often means no offer at all.”
OffDeal’s technology platform, built by engineers from leading technology companies such as Meta and Google, has tracked every landscaping company in the country along with every active buyer and their past deal history. This system powers a free, self-serve buyer-matching tool that shows owners which acquirers are most likely to pay a premium for their business. It also enables OffDeal to offer any landscaping owner a confidential market check, testing buyer interest and obtaining valuation feedback within 72 hours without revealing the business’s identity.
“Private equity buyers told us they routinely look at hundreds of landscaping businesses for every one they acquire,” says Eldarov. “That means when a buyer approaches an owner, there’s less than a 1 percent chance that conversation actually leads to a closed deal. We started OffDeal to flip those odds.”
The OffDeal banking team includes professionals from leading Wall Street firms such as J.P. Morgan, Evercore, Barclays and RBC Capital Markets. Unlike traditional M&A brokers, OffDeal operates on a success-only model.
