LAKEWOOD RANCH — A Lakewood Ranch residential development firm is a leading bidder for the assets of bankrupt homebuilder Tousa.
Starwood Land Ventures, LLC has put in a $61 million offer to purchase 5,499 of Tousa’s unstarted home lots in Florida, according to documents in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Lauderdale.
The court says Tousa received four other offers for the Florida assets but the homebuilder and Starwood entered into a non-binding letter of intent in July.
Jon Rapaport, president for Starwood’s Southeast Florida division, declined to comment on the firm’s intent to purchase Tousa’s property.
An auction is scheduled for Jan. 22 in Miami for all qualified bidders.
Tousa filed for bankruptcy in January 2008. The homebuilder has developments in Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada.
Tousa was involved in designing, building, and marketing single-family residences, town homes, and condominiums. It also provided financial services to its homebuyers and to others through its subsidiaries, Preferred Home Mortgage Co. and Universal Land Title, Inc.
Tousa’s predecessor company was founded in Houston, Texas in 1983 as Newmark Homes Corp. In December 1999, Tousa acquired 80 percent of Newmark’s stock.
Tousa also acquired 100 percent of then-public Engle Holdings Corp. in November 2000. On June 25, 2002, Engle merged with Newmark, and the merged company changed its name to Tousa, Inc.
Starwood Land Ventures, a residential real estate and investment firm, merged with a Dallas residential land development firm Taylor-Duncan Interests Inc. in April.
At the time Larry Taylor, president of Taylor-Duncan, said the newly merged company would focus on developing home sites and other single-family residential properties in Dallas-Fort Worth. Starwood Land Ventures is a controlled affiliate of Starwood Capital Group Global LLC, based in Greenwich, Conn. Starwood Capital is a privately-held, global real estate investment firm that specializes in real estate-related investments in commercial and residential developments. Starwood and its affiliates have invested about $6 billion of equity capital in transactions with more than $30 billion in assets.
The Criscitos has been selling South Florida luxury and commercial real estate for over a decade and has sold over $1 billion dollars of property. They work as a multi-lingual team speaking english, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. They carved out a niche as a leading boutique real estate company with two distinct divisions -residential and commercial- both personally overseeing by Marcela and Anthony Criscito.
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