Busiest RIA buyers average $679 million a deal, below the median

01The busiest acquirers are the small-check writers#

Start with the count. Merit Financial Advisors announced four deals in the period; Hightower, Beacon Pointe Advisors, Modern Wealth Management, Wealth Enhancement and AlphaCore Wealth Advisory announced three apiece.

Then divide each firm's disclosed client assets by its deals. Beacon Pointe's to $800 million. Four of the six sit below the $947 million median for the period.

That is a description of a business model, not a complaint about one. These are tuck-in machines: buy a practice of a few hundred million dollars, fold it onto a shared platform, keep the advisors, repeat next quarter. AlphaCore's entire 90 days disclosed less client assets than a single $1 billion practice would. Hightower oversees more than $350 billion and Merit about $33 billion, so both can play at either end of the market.

Read the four sub-median averages as a statement about what these firms are built to absorb. AlphaCore announced three such deals and had closed none by Oct. 26. The question for a $1 billion seller is not whether those firms would take the meeting. It is whether a platform tuned to practices a fraction of that size has a playbook for the much larger one, and the count column answers a different question than the one being asked.

Beacon Pointe's arithmetic changes when a large deal lands inside a busy quarter. It disclosed three acquisitions on Oct. 20 worth $1.35 billion combined, led by WorthPointe Financial Planners at about $1 billion, and crossed $70 billion in client assets. Its average is still $800 million a deal, because the other two were smaller. One large purchase carried by two small ones is a different strategy from a book built on large purchases.

02Announcements outnumber closings roughly three to one, and only one is ranked#

Across the whole 90 days, 50 deals closed against 156 announced. The two columns measure different things — an announcement in late September has had a month to complete, not a year — but only one of them gets ranked, and it is not the one that requires money to change hands.

Hightower is the cleanest case. Three deals, $3.5 billion of disclosed client assets, and not one of the three closed inside the window. One of them moved a practice from one part of Hightower to another: The Bahnsen Group, itself a Hightower company, agreed to add Hightower Naples, a $1.1 billion Florida practice led by David Emma and Mark Masterson, who joined the firm in 2011, with the transaction expected to close at the end of the year.

The mechanics are worth following, because they show what a deal can be. The Bahnsen Group was acquired by Hightower in April and became another hub within Hightower for integrating advisory firms. Hightower Naples will operate under the Bahnsen brand and give the group its second Florida location. The closing is expected at the end of the year, which by itself places it outside a window that ends Oct. 26. Nothing in that sequence involves an owner choosing among bidders. It involves a company moving a practice from one part of its own organization to another.

David Bahnsen described it as "A perfect first acquisition for us – and it won't be the last". Both statements describe a real strategy with an internal logic. Neither is the same event as buying a third-party RIA from an owner deciding whether to sell, and that is the event the seller is trying to price.

Merit runs the other way. Four announcements produced three closings. Its $1.1 billion Moldenhauer & Associates deal closed Sept. 25 and drew coverage two weeks later; Brett Moldenhauer's 13-person team stays in Orchard Park, N.Y., serving nearly 1,900 households, and the consideration was cash and equity with the rest undisclosed. It was the 10th former Commonwealth Financial Network practice Merit has bought.

CAPTRUST shows the same ambiguity from another angle. It announced three deals, closed one, and disclosed client assets on none of them, so no size-based average can rank it at all. Names are a term too. Its Long Island pair had worked side by side since 2018 and carried $1.2 billion across seven professionals; both will drop their own names and operate under the Captrust brand. For an owner who has spent 30 years building a name in a suburb, that is a negotiating point as concrete as the multiple, and the count column will never show it.

A seller reading a column of 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3 has no way to tell a third-party purchase from a franchise move inside the family. Those are different events with different consequences for someone deciding where to place 30 years of client relationships.

03Nine deals cleared $5 billion; a $1 billion book is the median#

The distribution matters more than the leaderboard. Of the 69 deals that disclosed client assets, 36 came in under $1 billion and only nine cleared $5 billion. At $1 billion, a book is not a large deal. It is the median one.

The buyer list for a deal that size is therefore much shorter than the list of firms that announce anything at all. Concurrent ranks eighth by count with two deals, yet carries the largest disclosed client assets in the table. Its $5.4 billion purchase of Spire Investment Partners, a McLean, Va., hybrid RIA with more than 30 advisor teams on its platform, closed Sept. 30.

Read that as a seller should: the buyer is looking above $1 billion, which puts a $1 billion practice at the small end of a real check rather than the top of a small one.

Not every large book is for sale. Jim Atwood and Phil Scott left JPMorgan with $18.6 billion in client assets to launch Latigo Peak Partners with 48 professionals and no private equity capital. The largest RIAs increasingly have the option of becoming the buyer rather than the target, which narrows the field further for a seller of ordinary size.

04The count leaders can write big checks and still not be the list#

The strongest case for the leaderboard is that repetition teaches integration, and the firms at the top have already graduated. A seller who wants a buyer with practice at absorbing a large book can find one at the top of this table.

Give the objection its strongest form: if integration skill compounds, the firms that sign most should earn the right to the largest books, and the count should be a proxy for capability. It is a proxy for something. A firm that size can buy a billion-dollar book without topping a quarterly count. Frequency and capacity are correlated, not identical, and a seller needs the second one.

The argument is right about integration and silent about price. None of the deals discussed here disclosed terms: Cerity Partners' $1.7 billion double deal carried no financial terms, Beacon Pointe's $1 billion WorthPointe purchase disclosed none, and Merit's Moldenhauer deal was cash and equity with additional terms undisclosed. A count tells a seller how often a firm signs. It says nothing about the multiple, the equity roll, the earn-out or the note.

Capital structure is where the count misleads most. Beacon Pointe is backed by KKR; Waverly's expansion runs through the Aspire platform; Mercer Advisors is private-equity owned and refinanced in the syndicated loan market. The firms with the deepest capital are not always the ones with the most announcements, and firms announcing three deals a quarter are frequently buying small enough to fund from operating cash flow. Those are two different kinds of buyer, and only one of them is shopping for a $1 billion book.

Retention is the part of the record no leaderboard carries. Beacon Pointe's WorthPointe purchase arrived without WorthPointe's founder: Christopher Van Slyke, a majority owner, did not join the firm and is pursuing other projects, according to a Beacon Pointe spokesperson. Elsewhere, RIABiz reported XY Planning Network recruiting at close to two firms a day and tied part of the surge to advisors leaving rollup-owned firms; PWD reported 110 XYPN firms working toward registration, up from 60 a year earlier. Neither fact condemns consolidation. Both suggest the post-close experience varies enough that a seller should ask about it directly rather than infer it from deal volume.

A perfect first acquisition for us – and it won't be the last.

David Bahnsen, The Bahnsen Group, via AdvisorHub

05Ask every bidder for its last four closed deals, with retention#

Three numbers belong in the shortlisting memo, and none of them is a deal count.

The second is the closed column. Modern Wealth closed all three of its deals in the window; Wealth Enhancement closed none of three. Ask each bidder for its last four closed transactions with client and advisor retention on each, and ask what the seller's own ten largest households would look like on the buyer's platform in month one.

The third is capital, the one figure a communications team cannot manufacture. Mercer refinanced $1.9 billion of debt into a seven-year syndicated term loan and added a $340 million revolver with a five-year maturity, and said the refinancing will help drive further deals. It priced a $1.65 billion leveraged loan at 2.75 percentage points over the floating benchmark and 99.75 cents on the dollar, cutting its borrowing cost by 175 basis points in the process. A bidder without committed capital cannot clear a $1 billion check, whatever its announcement count says.

The equity question deserves its own line in the memo. None of the announced transactions reviewed here states what share of consideration is stock, how it vests, or what happens to it if the buyer is itself sold. A seller comparing three bids on headline value is comparing three numbers that are not the same instrument, and the buyer with the loudest count is often the one paying in paper whose terms sit in a schedule nobody has read yet.

Timing cuts both ways. DeVoe & Company reported 72 RIA transactions announced through Sept. 22, 19 percent below the 89 announced in the same stretch of 2025, with macroeconomic headwinds and geopolitical turbulence cited for advisors delaying sale decisions. The same presentation put the first quarter at 93 transactions, matching the all-time quarterly high, then 74 in the second. A seller who waits for a longer bidder list may get a shorter one; a seller who starts now negotiates while the strongest buyers still need volume.

The dated test is the closed column at the end of the first quarter of 2027. If Hightower has converted all three of its announcements and Merit's $4.2 billion has closed at or near the disclosed assets, the count carried information this column said it did not. If it has not, the boards that built a bidder list from the leaderboard spent a quarter on the wrong names, and the division that takes two minutes per bidder was the cheapest diligence on offer.