01Why we exist
The residential HVAC market in the United States moves roughly $150 billion a year between equipment, installation, and service work. It is also one of the most opaque categories of home repair a typical family will ever deal with. A failed condenser on a 98-degree afternoon is not a situation where most homeowners have time to call six contractors, compare bids, and verify licensure through their state board. They call whoever answers. Whoever answers, unfortunately, is sometimes a marketing shell, a lead reseller, or an unlicensed operator running a truck with a magnet on the door.
National AC Solutions was founded in 2018 to shrink that risk. Our theory of the business is narrow and unglamorous: if we do the license verification, the insurance checks, the EPA 608 cross-reference, and the 90-day performance monitoring before a homeowner ever picks up the phone, the homeowner gets a better outcome and the good contractors get fewer tire-kicker leads. That is the entire product.
02Founding story
The company started in a converted warehouse office in Dallas after our founder, Marcus Reeves, spent two years watching his mother-in-law cycle through four different HVAC companies on a single 3-ton split system. Three of the four had expired licenses. One had invoiced for a refrigerant recharge on a system that was later shown to be leaking at the service valve, a textbook EPA Section 608 violation. The fourth — the one that finally fixed it — was a two-truck family shop that did not advertise anywhere online and relied entirely on word of mouth.
The lesson was not that lead-gen platforms are evil. The lesson was that the existing platforms were optimized for contractor acquisition, not for homeowner outcomes. A platform that charges a contractor per click has no reason to filter out contractors whose clicks convert. A platform that charges a homeowner zero dollars and charges a contractor per successful match, on the other hand, only makes money when the job actually happens and the homeowner does not complain afterward.
That alignment is the bet we opened the doors on. It is still the bet today.
03The problem we solve
Residential HVAC has three structural problems that make contractor selection harder than, say, picking a plumber:
Any one of those three is survivable. Together, they create a market where a homeowner’s best defense is a pre-vetted referral from someone who has already checked the boring regulatory paperwork. That is the job we took.
04How our business model actually works
We are free for homeowners. No form fees, no membership, no upsell. When you call our matching line or submit your details through a state or city page, we route the request to a contractor in our network whose license, insurance, and performance data we have already verified.
The contractor pays us a per-match referral fee only when they accept the job. If they decline the match, or if the homeowner decides not to move forward, no fee is charged. We do not sell the lead to multiple contractors. We do not auction the homeowner’s information. The match is exclusive and it is terminal — one homeowner, one pro, one introduction.
We can’t guarantee a specific contractor will take your job. The algorithm matches based on availability, proximity, and the pro’s current performance metrics. What we can guarantee is that whoever gets the match has already cleared our license, insurance, and EPA verification within the last twelve months.
05How we’re different from Angi, HomeAdvisor, and the lead-resellers
The dominant model in the home-services lead space is pay-per-lead with non-exclusive distribution. A single homeowner inquiry on Angi, HomeAdvisor (now Angi Leads), Networx, or Modernize can be sold to three, four, or five contractors simultaneously. That is great for the platform’s revenue per inquiry and bad for both the homeowner (who gets a day of unsolicited phone calls) and the contractor (who pays for leads that are racing four other trucks to the door).
We run the opposite setup:
This model produces less revenue per inquiry than the multi-sell approach. We are fine with that. It also produces higher homeowner satisfaction, lower contractor churn, and fewer complaints to the Better Business Bureau — which, over time, is the only way a referral service keeps working.
06Editorial independence
The guides, state pages, and equipment explainers on this site are written by our editorial team, not by the contractor network. Editorial reports to our Senior HVAC Editor, Jordan Reeves, who is not Marcus’s relative — the shared surname is a coincidence we have been asked about often enough to mention here. Fact-checking is handled by NATE-certified master technicians, led by Terrence Ahmad. Details on sourcing, corrections, and our ban on manufacturer-sponsored content are laid out in our Editorial Standards.
07Leadership
Marcus Reeves — Chief Executive Officer
Marcus founded National AC Solutions in 2018 after a decade in multi-site facilities management across healthcare real estate, where he was responsible for HVAC capital planning for roughly 4.2 million square feet of commercial building stock. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M and completed the RSES (Refrigeration Service Engineers Society) commercial HVAC certificate track. Marcus does not write consumer editorial and does not approve editorial copy before publication — a firewall we consider load-bearing.
Priya Venkataraman — Chief Operating Officer
Priya runs the contractor network operations team, including onboarding, vetting, probation monitoring, and removal decisions. Before joining in 2020 she ran regional dispatch operations for a Top-50 HVAC service chain across the Gulf Coast. She is the internal owner of the vetting scorecard described in How We Vet Contractors.
Jordan Reeves — Senior HVAC Editor
Jordan leads the editorial team and is responsible for our fact-check pipeline, correction policy, and source standards. Jordan holds NATE Core + Air Conditioning certifications and previously wrote technical training materials for an ACCA-affiliated contractor education program. Jordan is not related to Marcus.
Terrence Ahmad — Master Contractor, Editorial Fact-Checker
Terrence is a 22-year residential and light-commercial HVAC contractor out of the Chicago market, NATE-certified Senior Level, EPA 608 Universal. He reviews technical claims on every published guide before it goes live. If a number or a spec on this site is wrong, Terrence is the person who missed it — and we will publish a correction under his name.
Senior advisors
08What we are not
We are not a contractor ourselves. We do not dispatch trucks, we do not carry equipment inventory, and we do not set the price of any job. We are not affiliated with any manufacturer — Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem, Daikin, Mitsubishi, or otherwise. We do not accept paid placements from manufacturers in editorial. We are not a review site; we do not publish user-submitted ratings, because we have not yet found a way to do that without creating incentives for manipulation.
What we are is a narrow, boring, transparent referral service with an editorial team attached. That is the entire company.