Florida Developer Purchases Talega Valley Housing Project in San Clemente Foothills

In what is believed to be the largest Orange County land transaction this year, a Florida firm bought a 2,200-acre residential housing site known as the Talega Valley project in the foothills of San Clemente.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but county records indicate that a subsidiary of Arvida Corp. in Boca Raton paid $75 million, or about $34,100 an acre, for the Talega Valley project. Southmark Pacific, a subsidiary of Southmark Corp. in Dallas, was the seller.

The new community will include nearly 5,000 homes that will sell for $100,000 to $500,000, with the bulk of the prices in the range of $200,000 to $250,000, said John Yelverton, president of Arvida’s California division, who called the development a “well-situated piece of property in a strong market.”

Southmark Pacific designed the community, secured the zoning and worked up engineering plans. It typically buys raw land and gets it into shape for construction before selling to a developer to start construction.

Arvida’s California division will develop the master-planned community, which starts about a mile north of Interstate 5 on Avenida Pico and spreads into the unincorporated county area.

Ground will be broken early next year on the development, which includes two golf courses, commercial and office areas and a light industrial district, Yelverton said.

One of the golf courses and some residential areas, which include apartments, attached housing and single-family housing, will be the first to go up, he said. The development will be built over the next 10 years, he said.

Arvida will spend the rest of this year refining engineering and grading plans and working with city and county officials on a number of items, he said.

The transaction, concluded last month, was “by far the largest one” in Orange County this year, said Marc Payne of Comps Inc., a San Diego property research firm. The next largest transaction, he said, was the $22.6 million sale of 200 acres in Laguna Hills. A 9.16-acre site in San Clemente sold for $7 million he said.

John Karevoll of TRW Real Estate Market Information said he, too, could find no larger transaction in Orange County.