Lawrence “Larry” Webb and Timothy Hogan ran two of Orange County’s larger homebuilders, John Laing Homes and Warmington Homes California, during the peak of the housing market.
Now Hogan and Webb are facing an entirely different challenge. They’ve been tapped to oversee the restructuring of a bankrupt master developer, Miami-based Land-Source Communities Development LLC.
The two longtime building executives, operating as Costa Mesa-based HoganWebb LLC, were named as co-chief restructuring officers for LandSource, which de-velops masterplanned communities in Arizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, Nevada and Texas.
LandSource’s largest investment is in Valencia-based Newhall Land and Farming Co., which is planning more than 20,000 homes in an undeveloped part of the Santa Clarita Valley, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles.
Newhall Land filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June, after it defaulted on loan payments and was unable to reach an agreement with its lenders to restructure its debt.
Its land holdings were valued at $1.8 billion earlier this year, down from $2.6 billion the prior year, making it one of the largest land deals to fail during the housing market’s downturn of the past two years.
Miami-based Lennar Corp. and LNR Property Corp. were the joint owners of LandSource until reducing their stakes in the venture in March 2007.
An investment partnership backed by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System paid about $900 million for a 68% stake in LandSource last year. Lennar and LNR each received $660 million in cash from the deal and they retained a 16% interest in the company.
Creditors of LandSource asked the bankruptcy court in Delaware,where the case is filed,to hire managers with homebuilding experience who were independent of Lennar and LNR. That’s when Webb and Hogan were contacted.
Their services were requested by former California Gov. Gray Davis, a lawyer with the Los Angeles office of Loeb & Loeb LLP, who is representing Newhall Land in the bankruptcy.
For more on this story, read the Sept. 22 issue of the Business Journal.
