Does RMR tell the whole story?

Today, Ken Kirschenbaum, an industry attorney, broached the topic of valuation in the alarm industry in his email to subscribers. In the monitoring space, a company's valuation is based “exclusively on a multiple of RMR,” Kirschenbaum explains. A reason for this is that, in a sale, an alarm company isn't selling its ongoing business so much as its subscriber accounts.

While the RMR multiple can shed light on the value of a company on the verge of a sale, it doesn't tell everything. In fact, as Kirschenbaum explains in the preface to an article by Dorsie Mosher of the Davis Group, RMR multiples can fall into a wide range based on several variables, such as contract stipulations, as well as financing and accounting decisions within the company.

This is why investors and financial institutions tend to prefer EBITDA—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—to RMR. They regard the former as the more telling valuation metric, says Mosher, because, simply put, the figure is less prone to flux due to uncontrollable variables. Through EBITDA, investors can get a better idea of how much cash will be generated to pay debts and finance future growth.

“A company can have $1 million in RMR and still be losing money, which is certainly not what the investor is looking for,” Mosher writes.

Kirschenbaum, for his part, believes EBITDA is not about to replace RMR multiples as the primary valuation metric in the alarm monitoring space. But when it comes to mergers, acquisitions and financing, it's worth keeping in mind that RMR isn't the only valuation category all parties are taking into account.