Developer to Buy 915 O.C. Lots : Real estate: Centex of Dallas will pay about $45 million for the Foothill Ranch property. It is the biggest such deal since ’88.

In the largest Orange County real estate transaction since the 1980s, Texas developer Centex Corp. has agreed to buy 915 single-family home lots in the master-planned community of Foothill Ranch for about $45 million.

Centex, with $2.3 billion in revenue for the nine months ended Dec. 31, is the nation’s largest home builder. It signed a letter of intent earlier this week to buy the property, barely edging out Kaufman & Broad, California’s largest home builder.

Centex, which is based in Dallas, has small number of small home-building projects in San Clemente and Rancho Cucamonga, and bigger developments in Hemet, Lake Elsinore, Victorville and Highland.

The property is being sold by the financially troubled William Lyon Co. of Newport Beach, which bought 1,277 lots in the master-planned community in the late 1980s. The property is five miles northeast of the spot where the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways merge. Foothill Ranch plans call for 4,000 homes and 8.5 million square feet of office, retail and industrial space.

Centex outbid not only Kaufman & Broad, which reportedly offered 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, said his firm bid about $45 million--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 would be about $50,000 a lot.

Lyon Co., one of Southern California’s largest home builders, ran into trouble in the early 1990s as slow 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 Foothill Ranch said Friday.

Dougall Agan, a spokesman for Foothill Ranch, said the Centex deal will mean “more construction and more people moving in.” Walmart, Target and Mervyn’s are opening stores in the community later this year, and a 24-screen movie theater is planned.

The Centex deal is the largest sale of a single block of residential lots in Orange County since 1988, when Barratt American, the U.S. division of Britain’s Barratt Homes, bought more than 700 plots from the Mission Viejo Co. Barratt later had financial troubles, and its lender took over 500 of the lots.

Centex’s stock, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, closed at $42.88 a share Friday, down 75 cents.