Buyers still pay up. They want the file first

RIA transactions fell 9% in the first half from last year's record start, to 120, while the client assets of the sellers in those deals rose 88%, to $342.9 billion, according to Fidelity Investments' biannual deal report. Fewer firms changed hands for a great deal more money; for a founder pricing a practice three or four years out, that pairing is the one that matters, because demand has not thinned while the standard of proof has.

The report's median deal size rose 22%, to $630 million, clearing the $400 million-to-$600 million band the prior edition described as holding steady across recent years, with 2021's near-zero interest rates the one exception it flagged. Deals for firms with at least $1 billion in client assets rose 6%, which William Bruckner, a vice president and strategic client consultant at Fidelity, ties to assets and advisors concentrating at the largest firms.

Three transactions carry much of that weight: Carlyle Group's acquisition of a majority stake in MAI Capital Management, Raymond James' purchase of Clark Capital Management, and the deal in which LPL Financial and Private Advisor Group are buying Mariner Advisor Network. Dividing the report's total seller assets by its transaction count yields roughly $2.9 billion per deal, an average the report does not state and one that runs more than four times the median—the arithmetic of a market where a handful of marquee transactions sets the totals.

Equally instructive is what did not repeat. Through the first half of 2026, the report finds no acquisition of an independent broker-dealer, against LPL's mega-acquisition of Commonwealth Financial Network last year; Commonwealth reports $212.7 billion in regulatory assets per WAD's records. Fidelity reads that absence as evidence of the channel's ongoing consolidation and a potentially shrinking pool of acquisition targets, which is how the total count can fall while the headline asset figure explodes.

Bruckner's list of what buyers keep prioritizing runs three items deep: a demonstrated track record of organic growth, a strong talent profile and low integration risk. He adds that sellers keep the space to weigh cultural fit, client experience and long-term strategic alignment, and points to 13 first-time buyers in 2026 as evidence that no single buyer type sets the terms. Read from the sell side, the list is a draft of the diligence file, and the advisor's translation of it is profitability, client retention and bench depth in roughly that order.

That translation is unkind to a practice coasting on market lift. A buyer can rebuild organic growth from custodian statements rather than accept it from a pitch, and the rebuilt number usually lands below the seller's arithmetic once a good year in the equity market has been stripped out. Retention is where attrition lives, and the retention line is the first number a buyer re-runs, because clients who were already drifting do not stop drifting when the accounts are repapered onto the buyer's platform. Bench depth is the question of who still services those clients once the founder's name comes off the door, and the answer is a bench, not a book—the same problem consolidators ran into in September, when six Modern Wealth advisors left a firm that had just acquired $710 million in assets, as we reported at the time.

Internal succession and an external sale now converge on the same homework, which is what most founders discover late. A junior partner buying in cannot fund a founder's number from the practice's cash flow, so the deal usually becomes a note and a multi-year payout, and an outside buyer with a longer questionnaire wants the same evidence a lender wants. The buyer can walk to the next target in a week, while the founder gets one clean shot at a sale; in a market that cleared 120 deals in a half-year, the thinner the file, the more of the price migrates into structure—contingencies, holdbacks, and a payout tied to clients who stay.

A market whose median deal runs $630 million is shopping for platforms that survive a founder's departure rather than books that need one. Closing that gap is unglamorous and takes about two years: documenting net growth client by client, showing the attrition curve rather than the gross new-asset number, and putting real ownership in the hands of the next generation of advisors so the bench is a fact a buyer can verify rather than an intention stated in a deck.

Over the next two years, the sellers who get repriced out of premium territory will mostly be the profitable, growing ones who cannot prove either on paper. A practice with documented net growth, a documented retention curve, and a bench that holds the client relationships is scarce in a market whose median transaction just cleared $600 million for the first time in recent memory; a practice that is merely profitable is not, because profit without a file is a claim, and the buyers still writing premium checks are underwriting files. Anyone who takes most of the price in buyer equity should run that logic twice—an exit paid in paper is a loan to whatever the buyer does next, and a buyer that has just screened your organic growth knows exactly what it is paying for.

Fidelity's full-year report will show whether the shift is durable or a half-year artifact: whether the median holds above $600 million and where the smaller end of the count goes. Because deals at $1 billion and up rose while the overall count fell 9%, the decline sat below the $1 billion line, even though the half-year data does not break out the smaller firms. A founder below the $1 billion mark with a clean three-year record should treat that as an opening rather than a warning—the 13 first-time buyers are still shopping, and the founders who go early enough get to decide when the firm is sold instead of having the calendar decide for them.