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Investing

Lennar (LEN) Sells Some Valuable Real Estate

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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It is never good news when a home-builder sells a big portion of its real estate. Lennar (LEN) sold 11,000 home sites for $525 million. A company controlled by Morgan Stanley (MS) will take control of the land. Lennar will be able to buy-back some of the properties.

The home-builder may get a tax break from the action. If can take the losses on the land to shelter past profits. But, that is hardly reason to dump valuable property. Lennar is doing it because of the balance sheets of the company and its peers are facing sale of assets to keep solvent.

"There is a lot of money out there right now trying to do deals like this," says John Burns, a home-building consultant based in Irvine, Calif., who consulted with Morgan Stanley on the sale told The Wall Street Journal.

Buy land, they ain’t making any more of it. Lennar doesn’t seem to be able to afford the advice.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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