{"id":5068,"date":"2026-07-22T18:42:56","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T18:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/agency-acquisitions-hit-seven-year-low-as-ma-market-keeps-contracting\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T18:42:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T18:42:56","slug":"agency-acquisitions-hit-seven-year-low-as-ma-market-keeps-contracting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/agency-acquisitions-hit-seven-year-low-as-ma-market-keeps-contracting\/","title":{"rendered":"Agency acquisitions hit seven-year low as M&#038;A market keeps contracting"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Steve Germundson, a partner at OPTIS, frames it as a structural handoff rather than a market simply cooling off: the biggest, most active buyers of the last several years have sharply cut back, he said, while smaller and emerging PE firms, plus owners eyeing a near-term recapitalization, have picked up the pace instead. The likely drivers, according to\u00a0MarshBerry&#8217;s own 2026 M&amp;A analysis, are higher financing costs, integration fatigue after years of aggressive buying, and an industry-wide pivot toward organic growth and operational quality over sheer deal count. For a newer PE platform or a strategic buyer with fresh capital, that combination has opened a window: this is close to the least competition from the biggest checkbooks in the business has faced in years.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Germundson, a partner at OPTIS, frames it as a structural handoff rather than a market simply cooling off: the biggest, most active buyers of the last several years have sharply cut back, he said, while smaller and emerging PE firms, plus owners eyeing a near-term recapitalization, have picked up the pace instead. The likely [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1788,1393,4123,779,324,4122],"class_list":["post-5068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-acquisitions","tag-agency","tag-contracting","tag-hit","tag-market","tag-sevenyear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insuracarelife.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}