Collier County

Ken Kelly says he has bought Kelly Roofing's debt and assets rather than its equity, that the deposits customers paid came with them, and that crews should be back on open roofs after about a three week delay

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 14, 2026

A close view of pale untreated pine boards laid across a workbench, with two thin nails part driven into the nearest board beside a knot in the grain. Behind them, out of focus, are a white work surface holding a pencil, a utility knife, small jars of fixings and a red cordless tool battery, with a gloved hand entering the frame at the right edge. No faces, buildings, signage or legible lettering appear. A generic illustration of construction work, not a photograph of any Kelly Roofing job or of any customer's property. — Stock photo. Not the actual scene. *Photo: Kaboompics / Pexels*

What it changes

If you are a Kelly Roofing customer with a job that stopped halfway, this is the first thing since the collapse that points at your roof getting finished, and it is worth understanding exactly what it is and what it is not. Ken Kelly, whose father founded the company and who retired three years ago after selling much of it to a private equity firm six years ago, says he has put his own money in and bought the company's debt and assets. He is explicit that this is not an equity purchase, and that distinction is the whole substance of the story. Buying the assets and the debt lets him take the things he wants, including the signed customer agreements and the proposals that carried deposits, and it is a different act from buying the company that owes everybody money. His stated plan is to strip out the regional expansion, downsize, and refocus on Southwest Florida alone. His stated priority is the backlog: get crews up on the roofs that were left open and honour the agreements, on what he described as about a three week delay. Take that as an expectation rather than a date. Nobody has published a schedule, a job list, or an order of works, and a three week figure given in an interview is not a commitment you can hold anyone to. If you have a signed agreement or a paid deposit, the practical move this week is to get your own paperwork in order before you are asked for it: the signed proposal, every payment record with dates and method, the permit number if one was pulled, and any written communication about the stoppage. A customer who can produce that on request will be handled faster than one reconstructing it from memory, whoever ends up doing the handling. Now the part that has not changed, and this site is going to be blunt about it because the coverage elsewhere is not. The liens are still there. The mechanics' liens that suppliers recorded run against your property, not against the roofing company, and that is the entire reason they were effective in the first place. A sale of the company's debt and assets does not by itself release a lien recorded against a house. No lien release or satisfaction has been reported, and nothing in the account read for this item says one has happened. If you are one of the homeowners who paid the contractor in full and then received a lien anyway, your position today is exactly what it was last week, and the routes out of it are the statutory ones this site set out on August 11: a recorded lien expires one year from recording unless the lienor sues, a notice of contest cuts that to 60 days from service, and a show cause complaint puts the lienor on 20 days. Those clocks run on their own regardless of who now owns the roofing company, and a homeowner who waits for the new arrangement to solve it is spending time that a notice of contest would have spent better. The people furthest from any remedy are the ones with no roof left to finish. If you asked for a refund and got a cheque that bounced when the accounts froze, you are an unsecured creditor of the old arrangement, and buying assets and debt out of a collapsed business does not customarily carry an obligation to make good the cash the old business took. One customer described the loss as about two months of household income on Social Security and a small pension, which is the scale this lands at for people it lands hardest on. Subcontractors and vendors are in the same class, including a former contracted marketing executive who says she is owed more than 25,000 dollars. None of them has been told they are being paid. On the cause, treat what you read carefully, including here. Kelly's account is that the wider portfolio underperformed, that a legal dispute connected to one of the acquired brands added strain, that the lender tightened credit, that the company fell out of covenant and that the lender then froze the accounts. That is a coherent story and it may well be the right one, but it is the account of a man who has just bought the wreck, not a finding by a court, a regulator or an administrator, and no loan document or lender statement supports it publicly. The litigation he points at is an untried commercial dispute in which the allegations have been denied and counterclaims filed. There is also a wider lesson sitting underneath this one that has nothing to do with roofing. A long established local business was rolled up by a private equity buyer, expanded fast across other markets on borrowed money, and the covenant on that borrowing turned out to be the thing holding the whole structure up. When it broke, the failure did not stop at the balance sheet. It reached individual households in Collier County in the form of liens on their homes and deposits they cannot get back. Anyone signing a large deposit with a contractor in this market has a cheap protection available and mostly does not use it: ask who owns the company, pay in stages tied to work completed rather than up front, and get lien releases from the material supplier as you pay, not at the end. Those releases are the specific document that would have stopped most of the damage here.

The former owner of Kelly Roofing says he has bought the collapsed company's debt and assets and intends to put crews back on unfinished roofs after a delay of about three weeks.

Ken Kelly, whose father founded the Collier County company, told WINK Investigates he retired three years ago, having sold much of the business to the private equity firm Monument MicroCap Partners six years ago. He said he has now put his own money in to buy back the assets and the debt and restore operations.

He told the station:

"I wanted to take care of my employees, my customers, and my vendor relationships. I spent my whole life building [it]; it's just not fair to them."

Kelly was explicit that he did not reacquire the business through equity. He said he purchased its debt and assets, and that the purchase included customer proposals that carried deposits.

"For any customers that had given us a proposal... and a deposit, well, I've acquired those, too. So our job is to get back and finish what we promised we would do, albeit a three-week delay."

His stated plan is to remove the out of area operations, downsize, and refocus on Southwest Florida. Under Monument MicroCap Partners the group had added Integrity Roofing and Gutters in Central Florida, J&J Quality Builders near West Palm Beach, and Reliant Roofing in Jacksonville.

Kelly's account of the collapse is that performance across that wider portfolio, together with a legal dispute connected to one of the acquired brands, produced a financial squeeze, and that the lender then acted.

"What I believe happened is we simply had a fallout with the lender, the bank that was loaning us money to fund this operation," he said. "They decided to tighten down their credit and caused the company to go out of covenants... and once that happened, they froze all of our assets, including our bank accounts."

That is his account. It has not been confirmed against a loan document, a court filing or any statement from the lender, which is not named. This site reported on August 11 that the station's earlier reporting had Kelly Roofing's management accusing Chantelle Flores, founder of Integrity Roofing and Gutters, of multimillion dollar fraud in Delaware and Florida following last year's merger, that counsel for Flores denied the allegations and filed counterclaims, and that the allegations are untried.

The freeze left customers holding refund cheques that bounced. Andrew Aste told the station that the loss of his deposit was a serious blow on a fixed income. "We live on Social Security and a little bit of pension," he said. "This is like two months of income for us."

Elsewhere, work stopped midway and material suppliers including ABC Supply Co. recorded mechanics' liens against homeowners' properties over unpaid materials. North Naples homeowner Barry Stivers told the station:

"It seems like the only person that's not protected in this is the customer."

A former contracted chief marketing officer for the wider portfolio, who asked the station to withhold her name, said she is owed more than $25,000.

Nothing reported in this account releases a lien. The liens recorded by the supplier run against the homeowners' properties rather than against the roofing company, and a purchase of that company's debt and assets does not by itself discharge them. No lien release or satisfaction has been reported, and none was read for this item.

This site reported on August 11 that a new limited liability company, Kelly Roofing USA, LLC, document number L26000406764, was filed in Florida on August 5, and stated then that it had not established any connection between that filing and the repurchase described to customers. That position is unchanged. The state corporate record could not be read on this pass, because the Division of Corporations search returned an HTTP 403 to a full-header request, which is a bot block rather than a missing record.

No bankruptcy petition by any Kelly Roofing entity was found in the federal court records searched by this site on August 11, and no search was run today.

Where we read it: Chorus Nylander and Robin Wolf at WINK News. Read their story.

The document: No public filing has been released.

Ken Kelly says he has bought Kelly Roofing's debt and assets rather than its equity, that the deposits customers paid came with them, and that crews should be back on open roofs after about a three week delay

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