HD Supply, Chadwell, and Ferguson are built for different jobs
HD Supply, a subsidiary of The Home Depot, is a national MRO distributor. Its own site describes more than 100,000 maintenance, janitorial, and OS&E products, over 100 distribution centers across the U.S. and Canada, and free next-day delivery, serving multifamily alongside hospitality, healthcare, and government housing. Chadwell Supply calls itself the largest privately owned MRO supply company in the United States and serves the multifamily industry exclusively, with 34 local branches, next-day delivery, and a training arm it runs as Chadwell University. Ferguson is a trade house: North America's largest distributor of water and air solutions — plumbing, HVAC, PVF, appliances — with more than 1,700 locations and a claim of being within 60 miles of 95% of its customers. Three strong companies. Three different structures. None of them was built to be the cheapest on every line.
Big-box pro desks and marketplaces fill the gaps
Two more channels sit in most properties' purchasing mix. Big-box pro desks — the contractor programs at Home Depot and Lowe's — trade catalog depth for immediacy: a store near the property, stock on the shelf, same-day pickup when a unit is down and the part cannot wait for a truck. Online marketplaces such as Amazon Business run the other direction: enormous listed selection from many sellers, prices that move week to week, and no rep who knows your property. They can be strong on niche items distributors do not stock, but spec verification, returns, and warranty questions land on your team. Neither channel replaces a distributor relationship. Both belong in the comparison set, because sometimes one of them has the number.
Why 'who is cheapest' has no static answer
Because the answer changes by item and by week. The same SKU — a specific fill valve, a specific appliance part — can sit at meaningfully different prices across the suppliers a property already buys from, and the ranking is not stable: distributors reprice continuously as their own costs, promotions, and stocking decisions shift. Category strength moves the numbers too. A trade house with deep plumbing and HVAC volume prices that category differently than a generalist; a multifamily specialist stocks turn-focused goods the others treat as long tail. The spreads are widest in fragmented categories like HVAC and appliance parts, where catalogs overlap least. So any blanket claim — supplier X is cheapest — is only ever true for some items, at some moment, for some buyer. The honest answer is a moving table, not a winner.
Contract pricing means your price is not their price
Distributor pricing in this industry is negotiated. Management companies sign national account agreements, individual properties inherit custom catalogs, and rebates or off-invoice incentives adjust the real cost after the fact. The result: two properties can order the identical SKU from the identical supplier on the same day and pay different amounts — and neither number matches the public website. This breaks every shortcut buyers reach for. You cannot ask a peer what they pay and apply it. You cannot check a published price and assume it is yours. You cannot audit last year's negotiation and assume it still holds, because list prices drift underneath the contract. The only price that matters is the one your property is quoted today — which is why comparison has to happen inside your own purchasing, not in the abstract.
How to compare suppliers so the answer means something
Three rules make a supplier comparison real. First, compare at the SKU level. "Angle stop" is not a comparison; a manufacturer part number is. Descriptions hide substitutions, and substitutions hide price differences. Second, compare landed cost, not shelf price — delivery fees, freight minimums, small-order charges, and the labor of a will-call run all change which number is actually lower. Third, compare at order time. A comparison from last quarter is a historical document; the spread you found in March may have inverted by June. Few teams do this, because doing it manually means re-quoting hundreds of small items nobody has time to touch. The practical middle ground is auditing what you already bought: line-level invoice review shows where your current suppliers were beaten, which tells you where to re-quote first.
Single-supplier loyalty has a quiet cost
Consolidating with one supplier buys real things: one rep who knows the property, one account, one delivery cadence, fewer POs. What it quietly removes is the price check. When no order is ever quoted twice, overcharges do not announce themselves — they compound across thousands of small lines. The stakes are not small. The National Apartment Association's 2024 Income/Expense IQ benchmark put repairs and maintenance at $1,098 per unit, inside $8,657 per unit of total operating expenses — and much of that maintenance cost per unit flows through supplier invoices. Stilwell's line-item audits, delivered through The Benchmark, find an average of $22,546 per year in verified savings for a 200-unit property — money sitting in the gap between the price paid and the price available. Loyalty is fine. Unexamined loyalty is expensive.
The comparison is becoming automatic
The honest conclusion of a supplier comparison is uncomfortable: the work is real, the answer expires, and the spread is widest on exactly the low-attention items nobody has time to shop. That points to automation. Stilwell's quarterly Benchmark already runs the comparison backward — it reads every repairs-and-maintenance invoice a property paid, prices each line against cheaper verified suppliers, and shows where the property overpaid and where to buy instead. The forward version is coming: The Benchmark Search, a proactive best-price search built for multifamily purchasing, strongest where spreads run widest — niche categories like HVAC and appliance parts. Until then, the discipline stands on its own. Quote more than one supplier. Compare at the SKU level, at landed cost, at order time. Repeat, because the answer moves.
