Oakbridge Insurance Agency LLC, a PE-backed insurance distribution platform, has added Larry S. Helms & Associates Insurance Services, a commercial and personal lines firm serving the greater Charlotte, North Carolina, market, to its network. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither party specified whether the arrangement involves a change of ownership or an affiliation structure that leaves Helms independently owned. Helms' existing leadership team and client-facing advisors remain in place.
Oakbridge has been backed by Audax Private Equity since 2023, following an earlier growth investment from Corsair Capital that combined four Georgia agencies to form the company in 2019. Recent additions to the Oakbridge platform have included agencies focused on agricultural and crop risk and education-sector coverage, extending a specialty-driven acquisition strategy that the Helms deal now brings into the Charlotte market's construction and collector vehicle niches.
Larry S. Helms & Associates has built expertise in specialty coverage areas including construction and collector vehicles, and has developed one of the region's largest Hagerty portfolios focused on high-value collector automobiles. Steven Helms (pictured, left), principal of the firm, said the arrangement was designed to expand opportunities without giving up local control. "Our clients depend on us to anticipate market shifts and structure insurance programs that endure," Helms said, adding that the deal would help the firm negotiate more effectively, tap into broader specialty expertise and work alongside like-minded professionals, while keeping leadership, relationships and responsibility based in the Charlotte area.
Robbie Smith (pictured, right), executive chairman of Oakbridge, pointed to Charlotte's growth as a factor behind the deal, saying Helms had built strong market credibility handling complex personal and commercial risk with discipline. "The Charlotte metropolitan area continues to experience significant growth, attracting families and businesses from across the country," Smith said.
Charlotte has been one of the fastest-growing large metro areas in the country. US Census Bureau estimates showed the city added more than 20,700 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, the largest numeric gain of any major American city over that period, pushing its population to roughly 965,000. The wider Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia metro ranked 11th nationally for numeric population growth over the same window, part of a broader trend of corporate relocations and expansions across finance and manufacturing that has widened the pool of commercial and personal lines clients in the market Helms serves.
Helms' collector vehicle book sits inside a specialty line that has been expanding briskly nationally. Hagerty, the market's largest dedicated collector car insurer, reported full-year 2025 written premium growth of 14%, with total insured vehicles rising 9% year-over-year to 2.8 million, and has guided to written premium growth of 15% to 16% for 2026. Distribution in the space is also broadening: starting in 2026, Liberty Mutual and its Safeco subsidiary began offering Hagerty's collector car coverage through independent agents, widening access to specialty collector coverage beyond insurers' own direct channels. For agencies like Helms with an established Hagerty book, that growing carrier and distribution interest helps explain why specialty concentration has become a selling point in broker consolidation deals.
The Oakbridge-Helms deal comes as overall agency M&A activity in the US has cooled. According to OPTIS Partners' tracking of North American agent and broker transactions, deal volume fell to 292 acquisitions in the first half of 2026, down 15% from 342 a year earlier and the lowest first-half total in seven years, with the trailing 12-month count of 646 deals the weakest since early 2019. Private equity-backed and hybrid buyers continued to account for roughly three-quarters of all deals in that period - a backdrop against which a PE-backed platform like Oakbridge continuing to add specialty-niche agencies stands out as a sign of where deal activity is still concentrated even as overall volume contracts.
