Meet The Private Equity-Backed Investors Dying To Buy Funeral Homes

When appraising a funeral home, Phil Crawford always asks one question: “Where’s your leftover room?”

Crawford, an Ohio-based real estate appraiser who is being asked to do more and more funeral homes, uses the response to size up a property’s physical constraints — and its hidden perils.

A leftover room is a required space, usually in the basement, where unclaimed human remains are stored. Nearby, there may be an old embalming room. Even though most funeral homes now outsource body preparation, decades of chemical use have left fluids embedded in the walls and a nauseating odor that never quite disappears.

Those realities haven’t spooked investors. They’ve helped turn funeral homes into one of the most aggressively targeted real estate niches in America, luring private equity firms and publicly traded operators to buy up properties tied to the country's rapidly aging population.

But they also have features that make these buildings difficult to convert, costly to remediate and deeply stigmatized — all factors that clarify why many funeral homes have never sold, stayed family-owned for generations and have only recently seized the attention of institutional capital.

“What the private equity guys do is go down Main Street and see which business they can buy,” Crawford said. “A funeral home is no different. That's just as much a staple to that community as anything else is.”

And now, as the U.S. population ages, deaths rise and a wave of longtime funeral home proprietors looks to retire, those same properties are suddenly at the center of a consolidation push reshaping the business of death.

Between 2010 and 2020, the U.S. population 65 years and older grew by nearly 56 million people, the fastest and largest growth in that cohort since the late 19th century, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The pandemic drove a surge in deaths, especially of older Americans, and generally pushed end-of-life planning to the forefront. And even though the U.S. death rate dipped as Covid-19 receded, 30,000 more Americans aged 65 and up died in 2024 than in 2023, a 1.3% increase.

The stock price of two of the largest publicly traded funeral home operators — Service Corporation International and Carriage Services — has roughly doubled since Jan. 1, 2020. Investors in the deathcare industry aren't all that different from developers focused on creating more senior housing as the so-called silver tsunami of aging baby boomers builds. 

Funeral home ownership is caught in a similar demographic situation. Nearly half of funeral home owners plan to retire by 2028, according to a 2023 survey by the National Funeral Directors Association, putting a plethora of funeral homes, crematoriums and cemeteries on the market. 

Of mortuary owners with succession plans, almost 30% would sell to a third party. Even among owners who don't have plans to exit the industry, 42% said they would consider selling their business if the right offer came along. 

And as the business of death has increasingly garnered attention, more of those offers are appearing. 

SCI, by far the industry’s largest operator with about 2,000 locations, spent more than $181M on 26 funeral service properties and six cemeteries in 2024. Another $62M went toward real estate purchases for the construction of new locations, according to its last annual report.

Then, in the first nine months of 2025, SCI spent $71M more on real estate, according to public filings.

“Through the 2010s, into the '20s, we've seen a much bigger pickup in consolidation,” said Chris Cruger, CEO of funeral and cemetery consultant The Foresight Cos. “Those firms that have now turned into operating companies are growing, and growing quite considerably, through acquisition.”

SCI, like many of its competitors, attributes its growth to demographics. The company claims that its backlog of future revenues from preneed sales — when services are arranged before a person’s death — totals approximately $16B, up from $11.1B in 2019. Annually, it expects to make more than $2.6B of preneed sales.

Everstory Partners acquired 72 cemeteries, 11 funeral homes and one crematory from Park Lawn Corp., another large operator, in late 2023, which boosted its funerary footprint to the approximately 450 locations it operates today.

Since then, the company has shifted to upgrading its real estate and deepening its presence in existing markets. The pandemic increased demand for outdoor gathering space and livestreaming capabilities, while rising cremation rates have prompted Everstory to add cremation gardens, reflection buildings and mausoleums.

“We're dedicating a lot of time and dollars to renovating a lot of our funeral homes to make the funeral home side of the business more engaging, for families to have a comforting space to visit,” Everstory Senior Vice President of Operations Matt Sobon said.

The year after its transaction with Everstory, Park Lawn was taken private in a deal that valued it at $871M. At the time, Park Lawn had approximately 170 locations but has since continued to grow. In 2025, the company announced it was expanding in Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia and Oklahoma.

But not all capital is coming from operators. Private equity firms have locked in on the industry for its real estate upside.

“In a lot of these cases, in what has been a pretty challenging profession for the past decade or more, is that value of the real estate could exceed, and in many cases does exceed, the value of the business,” Cruger said.

Cruger said he recently completed a Silicon Valley deal in which a property was valued at $30M, while the business was making about $2.5M in revenue per year. The transaction was one of the rare times he sold a property for development purposes. 

Such morbid sites tend to be stigmatized, Crawford said. Conversions can be equally, if not more, difficult.

“When you rebrand or repurpose these things, sometimes that [embalming] fluid, it’s hard to get that smell out,” Crawford said. 

Expanding in the industry is different from the typical “private equity playbook,” Big Sky Capital Partners co-founder and partner Dustin Cahan said. Many funeral homes are institutions in their communities going back decades, and a hostile-seeming takeover can be bad for business. 

“Even folks like the larger consolidators, like the SCIs of the world, they're very aware that they can't just buy a funeral home and immediately bring in new staff and change the branding,” Cahan said. 

The growing involvement of private equity in the deathcare space is rightfully drawing skepticism, University of Georgia School of Law professor Victoria Haneman said. 

“The people in the local neighborhood may think that they are continuing to do business with this legacy group that's been running the funeral home for, say, 60 years,” said Haneman, who specializes in deathcare services and industry disruption.

“At the end of the day, there is this unmitigated profit incentive that exists when we have the acquisition, the streamline and the investors to whom we are accountable,” she added. “This is an appealing industry because they know that only 16% of consumers ever look at more than one funeral home. People are not comparison shopping in this space.”

Sale-leaseback structures have become increasingly prevalent as large investors seek to boost margins by centralizing costs — from casket procurement to HR — while leaving the operator in place. 

Created four years ago, Big Sky Capital Partners is among the players building a portfolio of funeral homes through sale-leaseback deals. Backed largely by family office capital, the company bought more than 10 properties last year alone and is in talks to buy 10 more, though Cahan declined to provide details about Big Sky's full portfolio.

“The owners care about their communities deeply, and for them, the biggest concern is how to create liquidity but also allow this business to continue thriving,” Cahan said. 

Milestone Funeral Partners is similarly backed by private equity but strikes a different deal with owners. The company becomes a majority owner of the business but allows sellers to keep a portion of equity in their funeral homes. Of its 39 shareholders, 36 are licensed funeral home directors.

The directors will continue to manage day-to-day operations or shift into “semi-retired mode,” while Milestone will take over back office responsibilities, co-founder and CEO Michael Martel said. 

Martel himself has worked in various roles in the industry, from embalmer to a director at SCI. That helps build trust with owners looking to transition their businesses, he said. 

“Eventually, instead of us going out and visiting operators, the calls were coming in to us,” Martel said. “We have 90 firms now, and we had nothing in 2021, so we would expect to continue to grow at that pace or more rapidly.”

CORRECTION, FEB. 9, 9:30 A.M. ET: A previous version of this story misstated the name of Big Sky Capital Partners. The story has been updated.