On May 5th, Millennium Child Development Center got SBA approval to buy a day care in Dixon, California for $1,233,000. Twenty-one days later, it did it again. Vacaville, California this time - twenty minutes up the road for $1,865,000.

Same borrower. Same CDC. Same 300-month terms. Combined: $3.1M in SBA money and 38 jobs across two towns in Solano County.

I argue that this is a roll-up. Nobody involved will call it that, because “roll-up” is a term someone would use in a pitch deck, not a loan application. But two daycare centers in adjacent towns being bought back to back, sharing overhead and a management layer, is the first two moves of a platform strategy.

Source: SBA 504 FOIA loan-level data, as of 6/30/2026.

I pulled all 315 change-of-ownership loans approved in 2025 and 2026 thus far. The mix in industries is not close:

Hotels took 28% of all loans. The runner up (Child Care) got only 7%.

The 504 program is built around real estate and a 35-year fixed rate debt. A hotel is real estate with a business bolted on. It collateralizes cleanly, it amortizes over decades without straining, and the loan cap sist high enough to reach a real mid-market properly. These are the reasons why Hotels and Motels so greatly outnumber other industries in the data.

There is a more interesting story at #2 and #3. The Assisted Living industry has been forecasting a demographic boom for two decades. The oldest baby boomers turn 80 in 2026 and roughly 10,000 Americans have been turning 80 every day since 2025. The 80+ population is projected to grow about 36% between 2025 and 2035, against 5% overall population growth.

Child care is not a demand story. The child care supply collapse is real and well documented. Nearly 16,000 providers - 8,900 centers and 7,000 licensed family programs - closed permanently between December 2019 and March 2021, a 9% drop.

Source: SBA 504 FOIA loan-level data, change-of-ownership loans, HY2025-FY2026 YTD; NIC MAP Q1-Q2 2026; Child Care Aware of America; UC Berkeley Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood

HVAC: Nassau and Suffolk Counties, NY ($899,999)
Twenty years old, revenue of $1.1M net income of $200,000, four trucks and $150,000 of inventory included. That is about 4.5x earnings, against a 2.75x-3.25x norm for HVAC shops under $1M in revenue.

Commercial Real Estate Brokerage: South Florida ($1,500,000)
Twenty-two years, $886,724 in revenue, $542,028 SDE. A 61% margin on commission revenue, at 2.8x, which seller financing available. The margin is both the pitch and the problem. Earnings that clean usually mean the owner is the shop’s best producer, so the only question that matters is how much of that $542K SDE walks out with the owner on closing day.

Pest Control: South Florida ($400,000)
Thirty-plus years across Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties. Revenue of $409,848, SDE of $63,351, with $35,000 of of equipment and $2,000 of inventory in the price. That is 6.3x SDE, which is steep for a business of this size.

Listings sourced from BizQuest and BizBuySell. All figures seller-reported and unaudited. Verify with the broker before you act on any of it.

You just read SDE, net income, and cash flow in the same section - they are not the same number.

SDE - Seller’s Discretionary Earnings
Net profit, plus the owner’s salary, plus the truck, plus the phone, plus whatever else ran through the business for the owner’s benefit. It answers exactly one question: how much money does this thing pay one working owner? SDE is pretty standard below $2M in revenue, because down there the owner is usually the operator.

EBIDTA - Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization
Same idea, one enormous difference: it is calculated after paying a manager to do the owner’s job. It answers the question of “what does this earn as an asset?”

— Sold & Signed