Standard Pacific Withdraws Offering

COSTA MESA — Standard Pacific Corp. withdrew an offering of $100 million in notes after the home builder’s credit rating was upgraded.

The notes, which would have been due in 1999, were part of $200 million in debt securities that the Securities and Exchange Commission had approved.

Chief Financial Officer April Morris said that since the offering was announced two weeks ago, the company discovered that many other firms with lower credit ratings were offering corporate IOUs at higher interest rates, “well above 10%.”

“It’s all over the board,” Morris said. “We’re just going to sit on the sidelines for a bit. We’re not going to compete with those high-yield papers. . . . It is sort of an aberration in the marketplace.”

Standard Pacific completed an offering of 3 million shares of common stock last month to raise about $36 million to reduce its long-term debt. The home builder switched from a limited partnership to a stock company at the beginning of the year.