Private Equity: Is there a slump in redemptions going on?

July 17, 2026/Finance/

Private Equity (PE) ownership in the funeral, cremation, cemetery, casket, and Death Care supply industry has been a hot topic over the past couple of years. Private Equity companies have been purchasing, aiding in the purchasing, or providing capital to many of the companies in Death Care over the past several years.

This recent article from Yahoo Finance titled “Private Equity is struggling with exits even as the AI boom deal takes over Wall Street” questions if there has been a lot of buying into companies and very little selling out of them. The article points out that the backlog of potential exits is growing so much that those companies that want to “cash out” may have problems doing so at profitable prices.

According to the article, from Pitchbook estimates, “PE firms are sitting on 13,325 unsold US companies as of the end of May, up from 12,900 as of last October. It will take 11 years to sell that existing inventory at the current pace, a two-year increase compared to last fall.”

Scott Bok, former CEO of investment bank Greenhill & Company made this comment in the article, “Private equity is really facing a conundrum right now. . . . . .It would be one thing if we were in difficult market times, but we have a reasonably strong economy, a stock market that sets a new record about once a week, and a booming IPO market.”

Steven Buibish, Pitchbook’s Director of U.S. Private Equity Research made these comments in the article that give some reason as to why there are so few “cash outs” at this time, “Purchases from that era (prior to 2022) were made with cheap debt, before the Federal Reserve’s 2022 rate hikes, at what we now know was sort of the top of the market. . . . . . This has created “a stalemate” between fund managers waiting for better valuations and their limited partners who want their money back. Private equity’s traditional playbook is now increasingly difficult to pull off.”

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: I find this very interesting. It brings me back to the days of listening to my dad about investing — he always said to be “well-rounded”. For instance I now suggest to my boys who are in their early working years to invest in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in many different sectors — Utilities, Retail, Energy, Manufacturing, Health Care, Technology, and on and on. . . . . Because, you never know which end of market the economy will lift at any given time.

It was only a short time ago – June 10, 2024 – when Funeral Director Daily published this article titled “Why Private Equity“. The article noted that as of 2023 the average annual return for a Private Equity investment for the past 20 years was 14.9% while the average annual return for the Global Stock Market of public companies was 7.9% for the same time period. . . . That makes an investment in PE look like a slam-dunk compared to the stock market.

However, this 2026 article from McKinsey & Company titled “Private Equity: Clearer view, tougher terrain” makes note that the 2025 “Top Quartile Buyer Returns” from Private Equity were 8% as compared to 2025 returns of the Nasdaq (21.1%), S&P 500 (17.9%), and Dow Jones (12.9%).

Private Equity in Death Care — For the last decade or so the view of many is that Private Equity has funded a major portion of Death Care companies who grow via the Merger and Acquisition mode. Private Equity also appears to be a major player in the start-up funding of new methods of disposition and in Death Care technology.

The following is, what I believe to be a non-comprehensive list, of Death Care companies identified from a Gemini Artificial Intelligence query of Death Care companies who “have or at one time had” Private Equity investors:

Tribute Technology
Legacy.com
Park Lawn Corporation
Pure Cremation (Great Britain)
Titan Casket
InvoCare (Australia)
Milestone Funeral Partners
Anthem Partners
Everstory Partners
Batesville

Related — During my research for this article I came across an interesting article on the Axar Capital website. Dated March 30, 2026, this article is titled “From grave concerns to growth, the Everstory revival”. I found it fascinating as, from my point of view, it relates the inside story of Axar Capital’s strategy to invest in what was then known as StoneMor, Inc. and the plan for Axar Capital to improve the company profitability in order to at some point in time bring it to market and be able to redeem their investment for a profit.

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