HB Wealth buys $700 million Austin RIA Wealth Care, its seventh market

HB Wealth closed its Sept. 30 acquisition of Wealth Care, an Austin practice with about $700 million in assets, and with it planted Texas as the seventh market for the Atlanta fee-only RIA, which reports more than $33 billion under management. That works out to roughly two points of AUM—the arithmetic to keep in hand, because this was not a scale purchase. As of Sept. 26, HB Wealth reported $30.2 billion in regulatory AUM across 26,148 accounts; the larger release figure likely counts total assets rather than the regulatory total, and neither HB Wealth nor the coverage reconciles the two.

What the buyer got for those two points is a specialty and a family. Wealth Care was founded in 2002 by Steven Podnos, a physician who practiced pulmonary and critical care medicine before moving into wealth management, and is run with his daughters, Rachel Podnos O'Leary and Lauren Podnos-Garner. The practice serves physicians and other healthcare professionals alongside high-net-worth and ultra-wealthy families, wrapping planning and investment management around tax work, asset protection, estate planning and the liability questions that trail medical careers and practices. Podnos kept practicing critical care in the Air Force Reserve until 2023, while his daughters work from Austin and he splits time between Austin and Cocoa Beach, Fla.

Texas is the seventh market for a firm that until last year was called Homrich Berg Wealth Management, joining Georgia, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. A rebrand proves nothing by itself, but shedding a hometown name is the usual precursor to selling outside the home state, and the map now fits that reading. Thomas Carroll, the CEO, described the arrival in those terms: the two-generation team "establishes a strong foundation for us in Austin," he said, and will be pivotal in how the firm brings what he called a valuable new dimension to serving medical professionals nationwide.

Advisor Growth Strategies advised Wealth Care, which suggests the practice was marketed rather than sold in a handshake. With no purchase price or earnout terms disclosed, the question worth pricing is whether HB Wealth wrote a check for an operating team with a referral channel into medicine—or bought a client list and will learn over three years what it was worth.

PWD's September report on Apella described a different model—eighteen deals, six of them in eight and a half months, at an average ticket roughly a fifth smaller than the ones that came before, the check shrinking as the count climbed. HB Wealth, one deal into a new state, is buying a market rather than a book, and the clients it is buying into carry exactly the complications the release advertises: liability, regulation and practice economics, landing on a family team that already speaks the language.

The coverage does not say what HB Wealth paid, or how much of the consideration is tied to the Podnos family staying put—which, for a deal built on a referral channel and a family's continued presence, is the actual purchase price.