Centex to Buy Slice of Orange County Land : Real estate: Nation’s largest home builder will pay troubled Lyon Co. $45 million for Foothill Ranch.

Centex Corp., the nation’s largest home builder, has agreed to buy 915 single-family home lots in the master-planned community of Foothill Ranch in Orange County for about $45 million.

Centex signed a letter of intent earlier this week to purchase the property, barely edging out Kaufman & Broad, California’s largest home builder. Dallas-based Centex has a handful of small home-building projects in San Clemente and Rancho Cucamonga, as well as bigger developments in Hemet, Lake Elsinore, Victorville and Highland.

The property is being sold by financially troubled William Lyon Co. in Newport Beach, which bought 1,277 lots in Foothill Ranch in the late 1980s. The community five miles northeast of the junction of Interstates 5 and 405 is to have 4,000 homes and 8.5 million square feet of office, retail and industrial space.

Centex outbid not only Kaufman & Broad, which also bid about $45 million for the lots, but also J.M. Peters Co. of Newport Beach, which bid about $30 million. Centex officials would not disclose the exact purchase price.

Roland Osgood, president of Kaufman & Broad’s Orange County division, confirmed that his company bid about $45 million for the land--an indication that the Centex bid must have been only slightly higher.

Lots in Foothill Ranch reportedly went for $80,000 to $100,000 when William Lyon Co. bought the property at the peak of the market. Centex’s purchase price was about $50,000 per lot.

Lyon, one of Southern California’s largest home builders, has run into trouble in recent years as the slowdown in home sales forced it to cut prices. That put the company behind on its own payments for land acquisition and construction loans.

Lyon has sold only 451 homes in its Foothill Ranch developments, or about a third of the houses it had planned to build, a spokesman for the community said Friday.

The spokesman said the sale to Centex will “mean more construction and more people moving in.”

Wal-Mart, Target and Mervyn’s plan to open stores in the Foothill Ranch community later this year, and a 24-screen movie theater is also planned.