Private Equity Firms Are Quietly Buying Up Local Funeral Homes

Liz Robertson Little and her husband, Robert Little, are on the youngish side for funeral directors in Vermont. Both are 33, in a state where the average mortician is in their mid-fifties. They work for Liz’s parents, Helen and Stephen Robertson, who own Sayles Funeral Home in St. Johnsbury and Guibord-Pearsons Funeral Home in Lyndonville.

The Littles expect to take over the family business, Caledonia Life Services, when the Robertsons retire in the next 10 years. For more than a century, it was a common practice for a mortician to leave their funeral home to one of their children or sell it to a younger associate.

Today, that’s rare. Robertson Little knows of only one other funeral director in Vermont who plans to take over the family mortuary. Increasingly, when funeral directors retire, they either close their doors, or they sell to a private equity firm that likely operates dozens of other death-related businesses across multiple states.

Most of the time, the public never notices the change of ownership because the name on the building and website remains the same. But in some parts of Vermont, including the Barre-Montpelier area, nearly all the funeral homes are owned by one of two out-of-state private equity firms: Milestone Funeral Partners, in Auburn, Maine; and Rollings Funeral Service, in Peachtree City, Ga. Rollings owns more than 90 death-care businesses in 18 states, according to its website. Consumer advocates warn that consolidation in Vermont’s death-care industry could lead to higher prices and fewer options for customers, as has happened in other states.

But some funeral professionals see potential upsides to private equity’s entry into Vermont, including more lucrative retirement options for aging morticians who don’t have succession plans and better compensation and working conditions for their younger employees.

“I’m trying to keep an open mind,” Robert Little said. “I don’t necessarily view what’s happening right now as a terrible thing or a great thing. It’s just what’s happening.”

Private equity firms are investment management companies that pool the money of wealthy individuals and institutional investors to purchase and run a business, streamline its operations, then (usually) sell it at a profit a few years later. In recent years, private equity firms have expanded into virtually every sector of the U.S. economy, including preschools, mining, restaurant chains, water treatment plants, youth sports leagues and mobile home parks. In Vermont, they’ve bought up nursing homes, addiction treatment centers and, as Seven Days reported in June, veterinary clinics. Among the state’s private equity-owned vet clinics, prices have largely gone up.

From an investment standpoint, death care offers long-term earning potential. Funeral homes and crematories have virtually recession-proof revenue streams, and many towns and cities have at least one. (Vermont’s Office of Professional Regulation lists 50 registered funeral homes, though some of those have multiple locations.) As most funeral directors will attest, their livelihood is based primarily on proximity and word-of-mouth recommendations. Unlike customers of other businesses, theirs rarely shop around for the lowest price; instead, they go to the nearest funeral home or the one that handled a relative or friend in the past.

Death care is anything but a dying industry, given the state’s aging demographics. According to U.S. Census data, nearly 25 percent of Vermonters are 65 or older, a figure that is projected to grow in the coming decades. With the oldest baby boomers entering their eighties, private equity firms, which only moved into Vermont’s death-care industry in the past five years, seek to reap profits in funeral homes, crematories, cemeteries, casket manufacturers and alternative burial options.

Funeral homes and crematories are also ripe for consolidation. Nationally, about 75 percent of them are small and independently owned, and most employ fewer than five people, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.

These mom-and-pop operations are facing economic pressures. In recent years, consumers have soured on traditional funerals and burials in favor of direct cremation, eroding funeral homes’ profit margins. Whereas a traditional full-service burial in Vermont costs, on average, $8,200, direct cremation runs about $2,300, according to the consumer advocacy website Funeralocity.

As a result, many independent funeral homes are saddled with debt and maintenance costs on infrastructure — buildings, hearses, embalming rooms — that are used far less often than in years past.

When Chris Palermo, former president of the Vermont Funeral Directors Association, entered the mortuary profess ion in the 1970s, 90 percent of his work was traditional funerals and burials; cremations accounted for only 10 percent. By 2020, when he retired and sold his business, Perkins-Parker Funeral Home in Waterbury, those numbers had nearly reversed: 80 to 85 percent of his clients chose direct cremations, he said, a reflection of national trends. Of the state’s 15 crematories, seven have been purchased by out-of-state corporations or private equity firms.

You lose flexibility and ability to serve your families the way you’d like to serve them. You serve them the way the corporation wants you to serve them.
Tom Harty

Perkins-Parker is now owned by Milestone Funeral Partners, a private equity firm that operates 119 funeral homes, crematories and cemeteries throughout New England and upstate New York, including 12 in Vermont. Milestone’s largest shareholder is Rosewood Private Investments, the private equity arm of Rosewood Corporation, a multibillion-dollar enterprise headquartered in Dallas. Rosewood’s other holdings include companies that provide services in IT, nutrition and wellness; fuel equipment distribution; and aerospace and defense contracting.

Milestone CEO Michael Martel is a licensed funeral director in Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts. He and his partner, Timothy “TJ” Smart, cofounded the firm in 2021 after decades in the funeral industry. Martel spent 23 years at Service Corporation International, North America’s largest provider of funeral, cremation and cemetery services. (SCI was heavily satirized in the HBO hit series “Six Feet Under” for its aggressive practices of buying up, or driving out of business, small, family-owned mortuaries.)

But Martel, whose firm entered its first partnership in Vermont when it purchased Pruneau-Polli Funeral Home in Barre in December 2021, paints Milestone as a kinder and gentler company, one that’s in it for the long haul.

“We’re both country funeral directors, and we saw an opportunity there,” Martel said. By buying up small, rural and suburban funeral homes and consolidating their operations — accounting, billing, purchasing, embalming — with others nearby, he explained, operators can reduce overhead, enabling Milestone to offer perks that most independent funeral homes cannot: paid internships, tuition reimbursement for mortuary school, health insurance and continuing education opportunities. Milestone even allows its funeral directors to earn equity in the company and become partners.

“We think that we offer something that is hard to come by in the industry,” Martel added.

Like many consumer-facing businesses, Vermont funeral homes struggle to find workers. And in a profession where the owner-operator may be on call 24-7, maintaining a healthy work-life balance can be difficult. Consolidation has allowed Milestone to provide workers with predictable schedules and more time off. “Those modest gains, when put together, lead to a stabilizing of a business,” Martell added.

But not everyone sees private equity’s arrival in Vermont as a good undertaking. Tom Harty, vice president of the Vermont Funeral Directors Association, was working for Hale Funeral Home & Cremation Care in Bradford when it was acquired by Milestone a few years ago. He left shortly thereafter and is no longer practicing.

“It’s like any other consolidated industry,” Harty said. “It all hinges on the dollar.”

Hale noted that all the funeral homes in the Barre-Montpelier area are now owned by Milestone. If a consumer wants to go with an independent one, he said, “You have no other choices except to leave town.”

Among the first things private equity firms do, he said, is raise prices. For years, the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit industry watchdog group once based in South Burlington, conducted annual price surveys in Vermont, but it no longer has a chapter in the state. However, anecdotal reports suggest that funeral and burial prices have been rising faster than inflation.

Rachel Bishop, a funeral director at the independently owned Day Funeral Home in Randolph, heard from colleagues in the Barre-Montpelier area that cremation services there shot up from $1,995 to $3,500 in two years. Bishop knows of one funeral home client in Northfield whose mother’s funeral, in 2025, cost $4,000 more than the father’s in 2023.

Bishop previously worked for LaVigne Funeral Home in Winooski, which owned a group of funeral homes that Milestone has since purchased. She said she left because she “saw the writing on the wall” as the company consolidated its operations with other funeral homes in the region.

There were other changes that troubled her. To reduce overhead, the company got rid of its prep room in its Northfield funeral home. If Bishop picked up a body in Northfield that needed to be embalmed and casketed, the body had to be driven more than an hour to Winooski for preparation. That not only added transportation costs, she said, but also meant that more people were responsible for the deceased, increasing the chance of errors. Different employees would often take the initial phone call from the bereaved family, pick up the body and prepare it for burial.

“You’re slowly losing touch with the people sitting across the table from you. That was concerning,” Bishop said. “It’s not what I got into this business to do.”

April St. Onge, who runs the Funeral Consumers Alliance in North Carolina, fields complaints from all around the country. The most serious ones, she said, typically involve large corporate- or private equity-owned funeral homes that showed a lack of care for families or didn’t honor prepaid contracts.

“From a consumer standpoint, when these large corporations buy up small mom-and-pop funeral homes, the bottom line changes,” she said. “They’re mostly looking at their return on investment.”

Harty, at the Vermont Funeral Directors Association, recognizes that private equity firms offer older morticians a way to recoup their investments, especially if there’s no family member or young associate to buy them out. But almost every owner-operator he knows who’s gone to work for a private equity firm has left after a short period of time.

Their model has become “cookie cutter,” he said. “You lose flexibility and ability to serve your families the way you’d like to serve them. You serve them the way the corporation wants you to serve them.”

What about the more regular hours and better pay they promise?

“That was one of the lures hung out there that never materialized,” Harty said. “I don’t know a single person who switched to Milestone who isn’t working harder and longer hours for less money.”

As for Liz Robertson Little at Caledonia Life Services, she noted that her parents received a sales pitch from Milestone to sell their business. Their reply, she said: “No, thank you.” ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “In the Black | As Vermont’s aging morticians retire, private equity firms are quietly buying up their funeral homes and crematories”