Installed Building Products acquires Old Dominion Group for $698 million, buying a 45-year-old mechanical insulation and firestopping contractor at roughly 10x trailing EBITDA

Installed Building Products (NYSE: IBP) has completed its acquisition of Old Dominion Group (“ODG”), a mechanical and industrial installer of insulation, firestopping, and related products headquartered in Midlothian, Virginia. IBP announced the deal on November 12, the same day it signed and closed. The company puts the enterprise value at $698 million, funded about 60% in cash and 40% in IBP stock issued to ODG’s shareholders. ODG CEO Jeff Davoud and his management team join IBP to run its mechanical and industrial installation business.

The asset.

Roddy Davoud founded Old Dominion Insulation in Midlothian, outside Richmond, on April 6, 1981, and started one of Virginia’s first privately owned insulation apprenticeship programs four years later. His son Jeff became CEO in 2012. Over four decades the company grew from pipe and duct insulation into a group of specialty contractors under the Old Dominion Group umbrella, formalized in 2018: Old Dominion Firestopping (its own entity since 2001, doing firestop work since 1987), abatement and demolition, heat trace, scaffolding, infection-control containments for hospital projects, and Division 10 building specialties. It added Kirby Cundiff Insulation and Firestop of Virginia in 2018, and Southern Thermal Solutions and Galloway Bell in 2024.

The group’s own locations page lists offices from Virginia and Maryland down through the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Jacksonville, plus Houston and Albuquerque. Its customers are the general and mechanical contractors and owners building and maintaining hospitals, schools, manufacturing plants, industrial facilities, and data centers.

The financials are unusually transparent for a deal this size. For the twelve months ended September 30, 2026, ODG produced about $370 million of revenue, $58.9 million of EBITDA, and $67.9 million of adjusted EBITDA after adding back $8.0 million of share-based compensation and $1.0 million of one-time items. That is an 18.4% adjusted margin, a strong number for a labor-heavy commercial specialty contractor.

The platform.

IBP, based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest installers of new-home insulation in the country, with more than 250 branches serving all 48 continental states. Around that core it installs waterproofing, firestopping, fireproofing, garage doors, gutters, shower doors, closet shelving, and other products for residential and commercial builders. Roughly 80% of its revenue has come from residential work, which ties its results closely to single-family housing starts.

This deal is IBP’s clearest move yet to change that mix. Before ODG, IBP had a commercial mechanical insulation business of about $50 million. Adding ODG makes it a roughly $420 million business, and IBP says commercial work rises from about 20% to about 28% of total company revenue. CEO Jeff Edwards called it “a significant step forward in our strategy to expand our presence in commercial and complementary building products.” The release frames the end markets as less correlated with the single-family cycle and says IBP intends to use ODG for further bolt-on acquisitions in what it calls a highly fragmented mechanical and industrial insulation market.

IBP is keeping the playbook it uses on the residential side. ODG keeps its regional brands and its leadership, and IBP finances its growth conservatively: it funded the cash portion with cash on hand and a term loan add-on it raised in October, and it puts transaction-adjusted net leverage at 1.9x, up from 1.3x before the deal.

What a public buyer paid, and how.

Because IBP is public, the multiple is printed rather than rumored. On a trailing basis, $698 million against $67.9 million of adjusted EBITDA is about 10.3x LTM. IBP’s headline figure is 9.3x, which counts the midpoint of the $6 million to $8 million in annual cost synergies it expects to reach within 24 months, mostly from buying materials at IBP’s scale and sharing back-office costs. Measured against ODG’s $58.9 million of unadjusted EBITDA, the multiple is closer to 11.9x. All three figures are trailing twelve months, not forward.

The structure carries as much information as the price. About 40% of the consideration came in stock: 1,381,731 IBP shares valued at $217.19 each, or roughly $300 million. The Davoud family and ODG’s shareholders also broadened ownership to about 75 of the company’s leaders and managers as part of the deal, and IBP’s board approved performance-based inducement awards for up to 50 key ODG employees, with a target value of $180 million paid in IBP shares and vesting over three- and five-year cumulative performance periods. A public strategic buyer paid a full trailing multiple and then tied a large share of the upside to the people who have to deliver it.

The M&A environment.

Specialty commercial contractors with exposure to hospitals, schools, manufacturing, and data centers have drawn some of the strongest buyer interest in the trades over the past two years. IBP is a different kind of buyer than the private equity mechanical platforms that have dominated recent headlines: a residential installer using its stock and balance sheet to buy its way into a commercial niche at scale, then committing to build on it with add-ons. For sellers of insulation, firestopping, and related specialty trades, that means another well-capitalized strategic is now actively looking.

What it means.

For owners of commercial specialty contractors, this deal offers a rare public data point: a scaled, family-founded, second-generation business with an 18% adjusted margin sold at roughly 10x trailing adjusted EBITDA to a strategic buyer. Smaller companies should not expect the same multiple, since ODG’s size, margin, and multi-state footprint are a large part of what earned it. The terms owners can learn from apply at any size: a large stock component, management staying in charge under its own brands, and incentives that reward the team for growth after closing. IBP has said it plans more bolt-ons in mechanical and industrial insulation, so owners in that niche, and in adjacent work like firestopping, should expect calls.