Mountain Real Estate Capital Acquires Assets in $15 Million Joint Venture with Shea Homes

ORLANDO, Fla.—July 26, 2010—Mountain Real Estate Capital (MREC) continues the success of its opportunistic investment platform during 2010 with the closing of a $15 million joint venture with Shea Homes Active Lifestyle Communities. The joint venture purchased the Cascades Community located in Groveland, Florida, just west of Orlando, from Bank of America. The Cascades Community is a 1,000-unit active adult project located in the highly successful U.S. 27 corridor of Orlando. The project will be developed as a Shea Trilogy community. Recreational amenities will include tennis and basketball courts, state-of-the-art exercise and pool facilities and one of the largest clubhouses (38,000 square feet) of its kind in the Orlando marketplace. Home prices in the community will range from $195,000 to $275,000. Under the joint venture, Shea Homes plans to construct 750 homes on the remaining home sites at the Cascades project, with a total projected sellout value in excess of $175 million. Mountain was able to underwrite and close the joint venture in 30 days.

"We view this transaction as a great opportunity for our group to partner with one of the premier private home builders in the United States," said Peter Fioretti, chief executive officer of MREC. "We are convinced that this community will successfully appeal to the active adult buyer looking for the right mix of diverse amenities and quality housing in the Orlando area. We are even more excited to establish a relationship with an experienced builder like Shea Homes, who we fully expect will be our partner on many projects in the future. I've personally known members of the Shea family for some 10 years, and they are truly a class act with tremendous success in being the best homebuilder in their specific market niches."

Joel Kaul and Eric Bialke of MREC worked directly with the Shea team to establish the new joint venture. "We believe the Cascades Community will be a great success for our partnership and for the current and future homeowners of the community," says Kaul. "The Shea Trilogy brand has been very successful all over the United States and their implementation of this brand at Cascades will create value for everyone associated with the community."

Shea Homes Active Lifestyle Communities division is led by Rick Andreen and Jeff McQueen as president and EVP. Andreen and McQueen have led the Active Lifestyle Communities division for the past 10 years and have developed and sold over 10,000 homes to active adults since 1999.

"We are extremely excited to kick off our relationship with Mountain Real Estate Capital," states Andreen. "We believe that there will be great home building opportunities over the next few years and to team up with an aggressive and creative equity group like Mountain is exactly what we need to continue to grow our Lifestyle Communities division."

Mountain Real Estate Capital is the equity investment arm of the Mountain Real Estate Group. Other affiliates include its lending group, Mountain Funding, and its asset management group, Mountain Asset Management. The new investment entity is focused on three types of investments:

The Mountain Real Estate Group, headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., has origination and management offices in most major regions of the country. Many of its professionals joined Mountain in 2009 from GMAC-ResCap's Business Capital Group, where they were responsible for the management and disposition of well over $2 billion of residential assets. Today, Mountain's team is involved in the ownership or management of over $1 billion worth of property throughout the U.S. Joel Kaul, who manages the origination effort for Mountain Real Estate Capital Partners, also headed the group of professionals who came over from GMAC-ResCap.



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