With headquarters since Spring 2023 in Dallas, and a business blueprint that calls for a turbo-charged upward arc of growth into homebuilding and development's top-20 enterprises, Landsea Homes today unveiled a $232.2 million "big statement" DFW-area acquisition.

Landsea – which has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Antares Homes, building new homes in 19 communities located in 13 locations primarily in the Fort Worth area of DFW – has been on a systematic four-year growth tear, featuring both mergers and acquisitions and organic growth in its trajectory and expansion into a Smile States juggernaut. Three months ago, Landsea added Colorado to that footprint with the acquisition of Longmont, CO-based Richfield Homes. Now, Landsea has fast-track operations in California, Arizona, and Florida, in addition to its Texas presence.

This deal essentially follows in lockstep with our game plan to establish a dynamic, high-opportunity presence in high-growth geographies," Landsea President and Chief Operating Officer Mike Forsum tells The Builder's Daily. "Dallas has been and will continue to be one of the most important new-home markets in the country – the Antares purchase bolsters our presence here."

Forsum notes that Landsea and Antares principals have been working on the combination for more than a year and that the timing to conclude the deal now could hardly be better.

The process has given us time to know Tommy McAden and his team very well by now – and the other way around," Forsum says. "We're now confident this is right down the fairway in terms of combining with an organization whose operating philosophy, strategy, and disciplines align so closely with Landsea. This combination will allow us to take what they do so well – first-time and first-time move-up – and begin to apply our High Performance Home systems to that.

Given that Tommy's footprint has been concentrated primarily in the Fort Worth Chisholm Trail Parkway corridor," Forsum adds, "we feel that with Tommy, we can double in size in the Greater Dallas metro by adding resources and focus to penetrate into the north."

Forsum likened the scale and impact of the Antares acquisition to Landsea's January 2022 purchase of Hanover Builders for $179.3 million, a dynamic platform that both added rocket fuel to Landsea's Florida beachhead and gave Landsea an operational and strategic launching pad for expansion into the American Southeast.

The Antares and Hanover Builders deals are similar in scalability and scope," says Forsum. "They both speak to our goal to ignite growth."

The Antares deal, per a press statement today, sets the definitive agreement purchase price at $232.2 million. This includes repayment of an anticipated $47.2 million of Antares Homes debt. Vestra Advisors, headed up by former Citi managing director and homebuilding M&A strategist Rich Moriarty, served as Landsea's financial advisor in the deal. The release adds:

The transaction has been unanimously approved by the Board of Directors for Landsea Homes, and is expected to close in early February of 2024, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Upon closing of this transaction, Antares Homes employees are expected to become part of the Landsea Homes team.

Commenting on the acquisition, Tommy McAden, President of Antares Homes, said, 'Landsea Homes' veteran homebuilding leadership team is guided by many of the same principles that we have used to build Antares Homes. The opportunity to introduce Landsea's High Performance Homes concept to our region and become part of one of Texas' up and coming homebuilders makes this the perfect fit for the Antares Homes team.'

In addition to working with one another over the past year-plus, Forsum and McAden have a working relationship that goes back more than a decade, to when Forsum was with Starwood Capital and McAden served as CFO at the bygone Technical Olympic.

As for what to expect next of Landsea, remarks from an earlier conversation we had with Mike Forsum still apply. Here are a few of those highlights:

We're consistent in the way we look at a long runway of growth for us. In Texas, we're very active in conversations and pursuits and those markets. These things take time and they kind of ebb and flow as every every deal has its timing. We're around the hoop on everything that we possibly can be – whether it be in Dallas, Houston, other Texas markets, or in Florida, working our way around the west side and up into the Panhandle and down. Then, moving up into the mid-Atlantic.

What's happened for us – because of our success with the last five acquisitions, and the value we deliver – is we start to become one of the builders of choice when somebody is looking to sell their company. That's particularly the case for these types of sizes and shapes. We're the ones who can show that we love to take the team whole-cloth and integrate them fully into our operations and bring them into our culture. That's a very compelling proposition for an owner visionary, who has worked really hard to grow a business has created value in it is looking to exit but doesn't just want to sell off assets and then have their people become synergistic cost events for them. Owners like that want their teams to have a future and that's what we provide.

When it comes to reloading our business as relates to M&A, we're not looking to bet the ranch on anybody at this point. When we see strategic opportunities that seem to be bite-size – for lack of a better word – that can help us to continue to get that sort of incremental growth into our business, and strategically get us into markets we want to get into in a thoughtful, risk-adjusted way. We're always in the game. I don't think this is a business you can just go off to the sidelines and just kind of hang out, especially being public. We always have to be in the game. However, being thoughtful and strategic and clever in how we're going about doing these deals is important to us, particularly when these times are kind of a little bit strange. We want to be careful."