Pennsylvania funeral home acquires “down and out” operator

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There’s always a risk when a funeral home firm acquires another location.  There’s even more risk when a funeral home acquires a location that has had its license suspended by a state board of funeral directors.

However, as you can read and view in this report from Pennsylvania’s WTAJ-TV News that’s exactly what is happening in Howard, Pennsylvania, with the acquisition of the former Singer-Kader-Neff Funeral Home by the 5th generation firm of Wetzler Funeral Service & Victorian Cremation Services of Bellafonte, Pennsylvania.

What has happened, according to this additional article from the Centre Daily of Centre County, Pennslyvania (which you may not be able to access because of a paywall) is that the former owner of Singer-Kader-Neff Funeral Home has pleaded guilty to abuse of a corpse and with that plea agreement, again according to that article, has had to give up his funeral director license which would prohibit him from working in any capacity within the mortuary field.

The new owner of the mortuary, Wetzler Funeral Service & Victorian Cremation Services owner Dylan Wetzler made these comments in the WTAJ-TV article, “I wasn’t sure if it was something we were going to want to entertain just because of the history.  Coming here to earn the trust of Howard back was going to be difficult. Once you leave, once a family chooses to go to a different funeral home, it’s very tough to get them to come back, especially with what had happened here.”

Wetzler is making “thousands of dollars” worth of renovations to the structure and expects these renovations to be done by the Spring of 2026.  He’s also making a committment to the Howard community by announcing that the funeral home will honor all previously made prearrangements.

Here is the website of the Wetzler Funeral Home and Victorian Cremation Services.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take:  My dad, who was the 3rd generation funeral home owner in our family and who not only operated the funeral home, but also operated a small retail furniture store and liked to accumulate real estate, used to tell me, “You don’t always make your income by how much you sell something for, but by how much you bought it for.”

Dad served on a bank board and also had great relationships with all the bankers in our small community.  It was those relationships which allowed him to purchase distressed real estate for “dimes on the dollar”, improve it, and then sell it for a good profit.  In essence, his profit came not from the high selling price, but the low acquisition cost.

My guess is that is what will happen with this transaction.  Bellafonte and Howard are small communities in Pennsylvania where there is probably not a great amount of choice of funeral home operators.  And, the fact that Bellafonte is only 12 miles from Howard should allow the Wetzler family the ability to service Howard in an economical fashion — possibly folding the work into the existing staff in Bellafonte which would allow for economies of scale in the most expensive category of costs.

In addition, reputations among small rural communities travel fast.  The fact that the Wetzler family has been in business in Bellafonte since 1895 and are in their 5th generation of operation should give comfort to those Howard families and retard any movement to funeral homes in other communities — especially since Wetzler’s will not only be keeping a facility in Howard, but making visible improvements to it.

I think that this is a good reminder that there are all kinds of reasons one funeral home may acquire another one.  It’s also a good reminder that there may be opportunities for funeral homes that might mean taking some reputational risk but that might be able to be funded, because you are taking that risk, with a financial outlay of “dimes on the dollar”.

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