Lennar Corp

Homebuilder Lennar Corp. will merge offices into a new regional headquarters in Aliso Viejo as part of a $27-million lease agreement, the largest of the year in Orange County. Lennar will move about 500 employees from Mission Viejo and other offices in Orange County to a new 137,352-square-foot building in mid-2004. The property at 25 Enterprise in the Summit Office Campus is owned by developer Parker Properties and its partner, Cigna Investments Inc.

Barry Minkow is headed back to prison to serve a five-year sentence for securities fraud, but the ex-con who reinvented himself as a San Diego minister and crime fighter was looking on the bright side of his situation. In his plea bargain to a single count of conspiracy, Minkow admitted that his falsehood-filled attacks on Lennar Corp. had caused the home builder to lose $583 million in stock market value. Because that amount was so huge, he might have been sentenced to 30 years or more had he gone to trial and been convicted instead of pleading guilty.

Lennar Corp. said Tuesday it completed the acquisition of Irvine-based home builder Polygon Communities for about $85 million. Lennar said it paid about 50% of the $85-million purchase price with common stock. The acquisition includes an existing backlog of $70 million and about 2,000 home sites. Lennar Corp., based in Miami, is a land and construction company.

Barry Minkow, a former Wall Street con artist who went on to build a reputation as an anti-fraud fighter, was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday for a securities swindle targeting U.S. homebuilder Lennar Corp . As part of his sentence, Minkow, 45, was also ordered by a Florida judge to pay $583.6 million in restitution to Lennar for his confessed role in spreading lies about the Miami-based company that caused its stock price to plummet...

Lennar Corp., the second-worst performer among U.S. home-building stocks last year, fell 14% after posting a wider first-quarter loss. The loss was $155.9 million, or 98 cents a share, compared with $88.2 million, or 56 cents, a year earlier, the Miami-based company said. That exceeded the 78 cents projected in a Bloomberg survey. Revenue fell 44% to $593.1 million. Lennar wrote down $10.2 million for 1,100 home sites it no longer intends to build on and said new orders tumbled 28% even as mortgage rates hit historic lows.

Lennar Corp., one of the nation's largest home builders, said that its sales in the third quarter plunged more than 50% and that it didn't expect the housing market to improve "for some time to come." By slashing costs, Lennar narrowed its loss to $89 million, or 56 cents a share, during the three months ended Aug. 31, from a loss of $513.9 million, or $3.25, in the year-ago quarter. Revenue fell to $1.11 billion from $2.34 billion. Lennar's results were in line with Wall Street forecasts, but its outlook disappointed investors, who sent its shares down almost 8%, or $1.01, to $12.73.

A partnership that includes Lennar Corp., one of the nation's largest home builders, said it had purchased about 800 acres in Huntington Beach, La Mirada and Richmond, Calif. The partnership, which includes Tiger Real Estate Fund of New York, bought the land from Chevron Land and Development Company for an undisclosed amount, and plans to continue developing the land, generating approximately $300 million in revenue.

The name most whispered these days in local real estate circles has to be "Lennar." One of the nation's largest home builders, Miami-based Lennar Corp. has been linked to ventures with the Baldwin brothers' troubled real estate empire and the Coto de Caza development, among others. Now, the word from John Jaffe, Lennar's local bigwig, is that the company is not interested in buying the bankrupt Baldwin Cos. anymore. "At the present time, our focus is on other things," Jaffe said Monday.

Leonard Miller, 69, the chairman and co-founder of home builder Lennar Corp., died Sunday of liver cancer at his home in Miami Beach. Miller founded F&R Builders with a $10,000 investment in 1954. By 1961, the company was selling more than 350 homes a year. In 1972, Miller and a friend, Arnold Rosen, took the Miami-based company public as Lennar. It now is one of the largest home builders in the nation, with 7,000 employees in 13 states.

In its first major move into Southern California, Miami builder Lennar Corp. has bought 2,200 acres here and will become manager of this large gated community in South County. One of the nation's largest home builders, Lennar teamed up with the Tiger Real Estate Fund, L.P. of New York to buy the property from a Chevron Land and Development Co. partnership. The price was not disclosed, but sources estimated the deal's value at $50 million.

In a plea bargain, former carpet-cleaning tycoon Barry Minkow has agreed to help federal prosecutors investigate a developer who allegedly hired him to spread lies about giant home builder Lennar Corp. with negative stories on the Internet and a YouTube video. In the plea agreement, obtained by The Times, Minkow acknowledges participating in a fraud with losses so huge that he could have been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison had he been convicted of the crime. Instead, he is to plead guilty in a Miami federal courthouse Wednesday to a single count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, a crime with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Federal prosecutors have drafted a new chapter in the life story of Barry Minkow, making it a tale of a teenage con man who straightened out, only to go bad again. Sent to prison more than two decades ago after the carpet-cleaning firm he started in his parents' garage in Reseda was exposed as a $100-million scam, Minkow in recent years had pursued twin careers as a Christian minister and a for-profit fraud investigator. He issued reports alleging wrongdoing at a number of companies and was credited by the FBI with helping bring several Ponzi schemes to light.

Barry Minkow, a 1980s teen tycoon from Reseda whose ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning firm turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, resigned as minister at a San Diego County church and intends to plead guilty to a charge of insider trading, according his attorney. The charge stems from a federal investigation in Florida involving a business, the Fraud Discovery Institute, that Minkow set up while guiding Community Bible Church in Mira Mesa. His idea was to reveal corporate fraud while holding short positions in the companies he exposed, allowing him to profit on declines in stock prices.

Home builder Lennar Corp. posted a bigger-than-expected third-quarter loss as revenue fell and interest costs rose. The net loss widened to $171.6 million, or 97 cents a share, from $89 million, or 56 cents, a year earlier, Lennar said. Revenue fell 42% to $643.6 million.

In the latest effort to move forward on a massive park planned for the former El Toro Marine base in Orange County, the city of Irvine has struck a new deal with the developer that is supposed to build thousands of homes around the parkland. In a 3-2 vote late Tuesday, the City Council approved substantial changes to its 2005 agreement with Lennar Corp., which bought the base from the Navy with the intention of building dozens of neighborhoods around 1,347 acres of city-owned land christened the Orange County Great Park.

A U.S. bankruptcy judge in Delaware cleared the way Monday for a home builder to buy back, at a substantial discount, a chunk of the Newhall Ranch development north of Los Angeles that it sold for nearly $1 billion to the California state retirement system in 2007. Lennar Corp. said in a news release that it paid $138 million for a 15% stake in a new company, to be called Newhall Land Development Co. Five lenders will own the other 85%.

The reshaping of Southern California's home-building industry intensified Wednesday with two huge deals involving some of the region's best-known residential companies. In one transaction, Orange County's largest home builder will merge with a company spun off from the empire of Ray Watt, a prominent Santa Monica developer who has built more than 100,000 homes since 1947.

In a plea bargain, former carpet-cleaning tycoon Barry Minkow has agreed to help federal prosecutors investigate a developer who allegedly hired him to spread lies about giant home builder Lennar Corp. with negative stories on the Internet and a YouTube video. In the plea agreement, obtained by The Times, Minkow acknowledges participating in a fraud with losses so huge that he could have been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison had he been convicted of the crime. Instead, he is to plead guilty in a Miami federal courthouse Wednesday to a single count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, a crime with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.