Introducing Tampa Home Watchdog: the public record of who owns your contractor

When your air conditioner fails in August, you call a name you recognize. What that name means has changed, and nobody sent you a notice.

Tampa Home Watchdog is a free public record of who owns Tampa Bay’s home-service companies. It launches today with 94 documented transactions covering 84 companies, 63 buyers and 62 investors, spanning 2010 through 2026 across eight trades: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, pest control, pool service, garage doors and restoration.

Twenty-six of those companies are in Hillsborough, nineteen in Pinellas, seventeen in Sarasota, eight each in Pasco and Manatee.

What’s in the database

Every record links to the others, so you can start anywhere:

• Company pages — who owns each brand now, when it sold, whether the name was kept, and every prior owner
• Buyer pages — each platform’s local brand roster and acquisition pace, from Strikepoint’s six Tampa Bay HVAC brands to Panther Service Group, formed in Tampa in 2026
• Investor pages — the funds behind the platforms
• Deal pages — one page per transaction, with dates, disclosed figures and source links
• County and trade pages — the local picture in one view
• Independents directory — locally owned contractors, with published ownership evidence

The nation’s largest residential HVAC, plumbing and electrical company, Apex Service Partners, is headquartered in Tampa — 75 brands, 13,000 employees, roughly $3 billion in revenue — and took a minority investment from Apollo in May 2026 (Source: Apollo Global Management, 2026). Seven independent Tampa Bay pool routes were absorbed by Pool Troopers before Pool Troopers itself was sold in January 2026.

Confidence levels

Every record carries a confidence label, shown on the page. This is the part that makes the database usable rather than merely interesting.

• Verified — backed by a primary document: a company press release, an SEC filing, a court record, or a state corporate filing. 76 of the 94 deals currently sit here.
• Reported — credible press coverage without a primary document behind it. 15 deals.
• Inferred — pattern evidence only, such as a brand appearing on a platform’s own roster page with no announcement. 3 deals, labeled as such on the page.

Where a fact is contested or unverifiable, the record says so. Strikepoint, for example, never names its capital partner in an acquisition release; its sponsor (New Mountain Capital) was established from the sponsor’s own portfolio disclosures and an SEC filing, and the evidence chain is on the page. The methodology page explains how ownership is classified and what “PE-backed” means here.

How to contribute

The long tail of this record — the small sale in 2014 that nobody wrote a press release about — will come from people who were there. The submit page takes four kinds of contribution:

1. Report a sale. A company, a buyer, a date, and a link or document.
2. Suggest a company that should be tracked.
3. Employee tip. Anonymous by default. What changed after the sale — compensation, quotas, pricing systems.
4. Correct an error. Corrections are logged publicly.

Everything is reviewed before publication. Nothing is posted because it was submitted.

Independence

Tampa Home Watchdog is not affiliated with any contractor, platform, private equity firm, trade association or industry group. No contractor pays to appear here or to be left out. The site does not sell leads, does not take referral fees, and does not accept payment to list a company as independent.

The editorial line is deliberate and narrow: this site examines the model — pricing systems, membership economics, commission structures, debt, and exit timelines — using public sources. It does not accuse any named company of misconduct. Where an opinion is offered, it is labeled as analysis. Where a claim is made, a source is linked.

That restraint is the point. A record only works if it is checkable.

What it means for homeowners

The model this site tracks is not illegal or hidden. It is announced constantly — in press releases written for investors, in trade publications, in SEC filings. It is simply never announced to you. Three practical things follow:

• Ownership sets structure, not character. Good technicians work at platform-owned companies and bad ones work at independents. What ownership determines is the price book, the compensation plan and the revenue target behind the visit.
• “Locally owned” is checkable. It is a matter of corporate record. Look it up before you assume it.
• A second bid should come from a second owner. In parts of Pinellas County, two nearby brands can share a parent. Comparing them is comparing one company to itself.

Start with the company database. If your contractor isn’t there and should be, tell us.