Heritage Holdings acquires Airside Technology, adding a Central New York commercial HVAC contractor to its industrial-services platform

On July 9, 2026, Heritage Holdings announced the acquisition of Airside Technology Corporation, a commercial and industrial HVAC contractor based in East Syracuse, New York. The deal adds another established mechanical-services provider to Heritage’s industrial-services portfolio and extends an existing HVAC platform that already operates under four distinct brands. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Founded in 1984, Airside has built a four-decade presence serving commercial, industrial, institutional, and municipal customers throughout Central New York. The company delivers a full range of HVAC work — controls, pipe fitting, and sheet metal — anchored by an automated, in-house fabrication facility that supports new-construction, replacement, and repair projects. Steve Perry, Airside’s president, will remain with the business following the transaction.

The asset: fabrication capability and a union workforce

What makes Airside distinctive is less its size than its capabilities. Its automated fabrication shop uses PC-controlled equipment to produce rectangular ductwork on demand and plasma technology to cut precision fittings — giving the company direct control over project schedules and the ability to deliver efficiently on “fast-track” commercial work. Paired with an experienced union labor force and long employee tenure, that in-house capacity has made Airside a preferred contractor for general contractors, institutional clients, and commercial building owners across the Syracuse market.

Those are precisely the attributes a buyer of a commercial mechanical business underwrites most closely: self-perform capacity that isn’t easily replicated, a skilled workforce in a structurally tight labor market, and durable relationships that generate repeat project work. Perry framed the decision to sell around culture and continuity: “Our people come first and the bottom line comes second.” He wanted a buyer who understood that, and pointed to Heritage as that partner.

The platform: a lower-middle-market industrial-services buyer

Heritage Holdings, based in Boston, invests in founder- and family-owned businesses across business services, industrial services, healthcare services, technology, and telecommunications. Since its founding in 2015, the firm has completed more than 50 acquisitions and recently closed its inaugural institutional fund with approximately $220 million in committed capital. Its stated approach emphasizes operational improvement, add-on acquisitions, systems implementation, and scalable growth — the standard toolkit of a buy-and-build investor, applied to industrial services rather than residential home services.

For Airside, the combination adds financial and operational resources while preserving the foundation the company built over 40 years. It joins an existing Heritage HVAC platform already running under four brands, where Airside’s fabrication capacity, union workforce, and Central New York customer base extend both the geographic map and the platform’s self-perform depth.

What it means for commercial HVAC and mechanical owners

This is a small, terms-undisclosed transaction, but it is a clean read on what commercial mechanical buyers actually pay for. Unlike residential HVAC — where the value engine is recurring service, maintenance agreements, and replacement demand — a commercial and industrial contractor like Airside is valued on capability and execution: self-perform fabrication, bonding-worthy project delivery, skilled union labor, and trusted general-contractor relationships. When those attributes are hard to build and harder to replace, they command real buyer interest even without a recurring-revenue story attached.

The second signal is about who is buying. A Boston lower-middle-market investor adding a four-brand HVAC platform to an industrial-services portfolio is a reminder that the buyer universe for commercial mechanical businesses now runs well beyond the sector’s named consolidators. Generalist industrial-services investors, single-trade roll-ups, and strategic operators are all competing for the same scarce assets — and each values fabrication, workforce, and customer relationships a little differently. For an owner, the practical question is less whether there is a buyer than which buyer’s model fits what you’ve actually built, and how your fabrication capacity, labor base, and backlog will read to each of them before you ever run a process.