Lake Street Capital launches HighPoint Exterior Home Services with Choufani & Bailey acquisition to scale roofing and residential repair across the East Coast

Lake Street Capital Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm, has officially unveiled a new residential services platform—HighPoint Exterior Home Services—through a controlling investment in Choufani & Bailey Roofing & Restoration, LLC, a growing North Carolina-based operator. This move signals the firm’s intensified focus on essential service businesses that are recession-resilient, regionally scalable, and ripe for platform roll-up strategies.

This development also aligns with a broader trend within the private equity landscape: targeting fragmented, necessity-based service sectors like roofing, siding, windows, and gutters. Amid a high-interest rate environment and shifting consumer sentiment, PE firms are increasingly placing long bets on categories that remain structurally in demand. Home exterior services, often tied to insurance events and infrastructure upgrades, are squarely in that bucket.

What Is the Rationale Behind Lake Street Capital’s Investment in Choufani & Bailey Roofing & Restoration?

Founded in Wilmington, North Carolina, Choufani & Bailey has carved out a defensible niche in the residential repair, replacement, and remodeling space. The firm focuses on retail and insurance-driven exterior services such as roofing repairs, gutter installation, siding upgrades, and window replacements. This operational model offers resilience across economic cycles and exposure to both discretionary and non-discretionary spending categories.

The company’s recent expansion into the Raleigh market further validated its playbook—centered on strong customer service, high-margin service delivery, and hyper-local branding. That success provided a scalable template attractive to investors. Its co-founders, James Bailey and Sharbel Choufani, emphasized their desire to find a long-term strategic partner to help expand their footprint across the U.S. East Coast, citing cultural alignment and operational chemistry with Lake Street’s team.

From an investor’s lens, this is a textbook platform bet. Choufani & Bailey possesses all the prerequisites for a scalable home services operator: strong brand equity, demonstrable revenue growth, repeatable market-entry success, and an efficient operating structure that integrates insurance claims, homeowner interactions, and contractor execution.

Why Is Lake Street Capital Betting on the Residential Exterior Services Sector?

Lake Street’s entry into this vertical echoes a broader structural shift in the private equity space, where firms increasingly target non-cyclical cash flow businesses that are fragmented and locally operated. Residential exterior services remain a highly disaggregated industry despite the growing professionalization of home improvement demand. Unlike HVAC or pest control—both of which have seen significant platform consolidation in the last five years—roofing and restoration still lack major national players.

This gives firms like Lake Street Capital room to aggregate leading local players under a scalable platform, introduce centralized systems such as CRM, logistics, and digital lead generation tools, and improve unit economics over time. The typical residential roofing job also commands healthy margins and frequent referrals—especially in storm-affected or rapidly growing housing markets.

Lake Street Managing Partner Justin Terzo noted the “continued momentum” in home services, calling them both recession-resilient and organically scalable, particularly through strategic bolt-on acquisitions and geographic growth. Managing Director Brant Wilczek added that Choufani & Bailey is a “perfect launch partner” given its strong local brand recognition and execution track record.

How Will the New Platform, HighPoint Exterior Home Services, Operate?

HighPoint Exterior Home Services will function as a regional consolidation platform focused on roofing, siding, windows, and gutter services, with Choufani & Bailey serving as its anchor acquisition. The operational roadmap for HighPoint includes expanding into geographies with aging housing stock and storm-driven repair demand, beginning with the Southeastern U.S. where demographic and weather-related factors are favorable. Building on the Wilmington-to-Raleigh expansion executed by Choufani & Bailey, the strategy now calls for replicating this model in similar high-demand markets.

In parallel, Lake Street Capital will pursue accretive acquisitions of local exterior services providers, folding them into the HighPoint ecosystem. These transactions will be structured to retain entrepreneurial leadership while introducing shared services such as finance, marketing, and human resources. By standardizing CRM platforms, workforce management software, and lead tracking systems, HighPoint will seek margin uplift through operational efficiency. Furthermore, the firm plans to pivot marketing from traditional word-of-mouth and offline referrals to SEO-optimized, digitally driven customer acquisition strategies, enhancing reach and ROI.

Cross-selling will also become a priority. Customers needing roof repairs often require related upgrades in siding, windows, or drainage systems. By bundling services and improving customer journey management, HighPoint intends to increase lifetime customer value. All of this will be underpinned by a centralized brand development initiative, ensuring a consistent experience across regions while respecting the local brand equity of acquired firms.

How Does This Deal Compare with Similar Private Equity Plays in Home Services?

Lake Street Capital’s approach mirrors a familiar formula seen in other private equity-driven service consolidations but distinguishes itself by building a new platform from the ground up. While firms such as Trivest Partners and Ares Management have rolled up existing networks in HVAC and plumbing, HighPoint is beginning with a clean strategic slate, anchored by a high-performing company rather than a legacy platform. This gives Lake Street broader latitude to define the operational architecture, governance structures, and brand framework from inception.

By comparison, other roll-ups often inherit fragmented systems, legacy debt, or brand confusion. HighPoint’s formation avoids these constraints, creating a streamlined foundation purpose-built for multi-regional scaling. As in comparable sectors, the success of this platform will likely rest on disciplined execution: choosing the right acquisition targets, integrating them efficiently, and maintaining service quality amid rapid expansion. Analysts tracking private equity deal flow in the home services vertical believe this model is likely to gain traction, especially in roofing where no dominant national player has yet emerged.

Institutional Sentiment: What’s the Investor Read on This Deal?

Although Choufani & Bailey remains privately held, institutional sentiment has generally leaned positive around this platform formation. Investors are showing increased enthusiasm for assets that generate stable cash flows, especially in industries where economic cycles have less impact on topline performance. The transaction underscores a broader pivot toward service-led businesses that deliver essential, often insurance-reimbursable functions, offering built-in demand even in down markets.

Industry watchers note that Lake Street Capital is deploying capital at a time when many PE firms are taking a more cautious stance. This suggests strong GP-LP alignment and a conviction-led view that roofing and exterior services present scalable, defensible growth opportunities. The presence of professional advisors on both sides—Stinson LLP and Miller Cooper & Co. for Lake Street, and Amdel Associates for Choufani & Bailey—further reinforces the strategic rigor behind the transaction.

What Could Be Next for HighPoint and the Broader Sector?

Looking ahead, HighPoint Exterior Home Services is expected to emerge as a consolidator in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states. Analysts anticipate that Lake Street Capital will prioritize entering states such as Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, which mirror North Carolina in demographic and housing dynamics. Concurrently, the platform is likely to enhance its management bench, potentially onboarding dedicated executives for finance, integration, marketing, and human capital functions.

Operational investments are also expected. These may include a unified ERP or project tracking solution, more sophisticated data dashboards for job costing and margin analysis, and centralized dispatch systems for multi-location field coordination. Marketing efforts will likely transition to a fully digital stack, encompassing paid search, local SEO, review management, and CRM-driven retargeting. In parallel, HighPoint may refine its acquisition playbook, benchmarking unit economics and customer retention rates as criteria for identifying bolt-on candidates.

In the broader sector, this move could catalyze a new wave of consolidation in residential roofing and restoration. Many smaller operators, especially those owned by aging founders or lacking digital capabilities, may see partnerships with platforms like HighPoint as an exit or growth pathway. If HighPoint achieves early success in expansion and integration, it could set the tone for what a modern, scalable, PE-backed home services brand looks like in the post-COVID era.

Sentiment Summary:

Although no public market activity is directly involved, Lake Street Capital’s investment reflects bullish private equity sentiment on recession-resistant, high-margin service sectors. Institutional capital continues to pivot toward fragmented industries with roll-up potential, and residential exterior services are rapidly becoming one of the most watched verticals. Adjacent public comparables such as TopBuild Corp. (NYSE: BLD) and Installed Building Products Inc. (NYSE: IBP) may attract analyst attention as investors track private capital flows and platform formation patterns.

HighPoint Exterior Home Services is poised for rapid expansion through acquisitions and organic market entry. Lake Street Capital is expected to deepen its portfolio over the next 12 to 18 months, targeting markets with high insurance claim activity and robust housing stock turnover. Analysts suggest this transaction may serve as a bellwether for increased platformization in residential home services, with operational execution and customer satisfaction emerging as key success metrics.