A land bank for D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilder, bought 232 homesites in Florida City for $28.5 million.
Miami-based Trans Florida Development, through an affiliate, bought the 40-acre vacant parcel on the southwest corner of Redland Road and Southwest 336th Street from an entity tied to Carrollton, Texas-based Onx Homes, according to records and real estate database Vizzda.
The deal breaks down to $711,788 per acre.
Trans Florida borrowed $50.7 million for construction from Renovo Financial and Setanta Development Capital, Vizzda records show.
Arlington, Texas-based D.R. Horton, led by Paul J. Romanowski, is considered the biggest homebuilder in the U.S. by both volume and sales, generating roughly $33 million in revenue annually, according to Builder magazine.
It has a significant presence in south Miami-Dade cities such as Florida City and nearby neighborhoods, though it’s the area’s second-biggest homebuilder after Miami-based Lennar, Colliers data shows.
In June, D.R. Horton paid $16.9 million for 97 lots in Homestead. Last year, the firm filed plans for 108 townhomes on a 7.2-acre site at 530 Southwest Third Avenue, 354 Southwest Seventh Street and two adjacent lots, also in Florida City.
On the southwest corner of Southwest 344th Street and 193rd Avenue in unincorporated south Miami-Dade, D.R. Horton plans a complex with 190 townhomes and 57 single-family homes.
Homebuilders have seized on south Miami-Dade, also home to the city of Homestead and neighborhoods such as Naranja, Princeton and Goulds, due to the area’s healthy supply of buildable land that trades at a discount from sites in prime county neighborhoods closer to the coast.
Large publicly traded homebuilders such as D.R. Horton and Lennar heavily rely on land banks, a strategy that allows them to lock down sites slated for future development but hold them off their balance sheets.
In essence, this allows them to outsource land ownership, one of the riskiest parts of a homebuilder’s business, and not weigh down their stock price by land that only costs but produces no income, experts have told The Real Deal. It also frees up their cash flow to focus on continuing to develop homes.
Usually, homebuilders pay land banks 15 percent to 20 percent deposit of the total cost to land banks to get homesites ready for development, a bargain compared to getting the sites ready for construction themselves.
In 2024, Jen Partners, a land bank for Lennar, paid $19.6 million for 19.3 acres of agricultural land on the southeast corner of Southwest 240th Street and Southwest 127th Avenue, signing an agreement with Lennar to develop the site.
Last year, Lennar spun off Millrose Properties, its own publicly traded land bank that enables the homebuilders’ land-light strategy. Lennar put $5.5 billion worth of its land holdings and $1 billion in cash into Millrose.
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