Park Lawn Corporation announced last week that they had purchased Christie’s Funeral Home and Crematorium in Yorktown, Saskatchewan.  The announced purchase price was $1.96 million (Canadian).  You can read the press release here.

The company announced that it was a strategic fit and will build upon their operations in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.  They also announced that Christie’s Funeral Home and Crematorium had been in business since 1882 and it will be operated locally by Park Lawn’s existing partners in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Joe and Kim Coffey.

Finally, Park Lawn announced that the purchase price was within Park Lawn’s publicly-stated EBITDA multiple range.

Funeral Director Daily take:  We are interested in seeing how Park Lawn Corporation moves ahead.  They are a recently brought public entity in the death care business based in Toronto, Canada.  Here are some things we have noticed:

• The company comes from a historical cemetery background and, in our opinion, seem to be aggressively moving into the funeral home market.
• They appear to have some “Regional Partners” which is reminiscent of the Loewen Group and their start in the early 1990’s in Canada.
• The company is interested in paying dividends to their shareholders in contrast to putting that money into growth.
• It just appears to us to be an interesting company, but one that is poised to both grow and reward shareholders with cash-dividend profits while they grow.  History tells us that balancing those objectives is not always an easy task.

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