Lennar Has Lost Interest in Buying the Baldwin Cos.

The name most whispered these days in local real estate circles has to be “Lennar.” One of the nation’s largest home builders, Miami-based Lennar Corp. has been linked to ventures with the Baldwin brothers’ troubled real estate empire and the Coto de Caza development, among others. Now, the word from John Jaffe, Lennar’s local bigwig, is that the company is not interested in buying the bankrupt Baldwin Cos. anymore. “At the present time, our focus is on other things,” Jaffe said Monday. It’s no wonder. The company is close to wrapping up a deal to buy about 1,500 housing lots in Coto de Caza, the gated, master-planned community in South County.

Under the agreement, Lennar and Tiger Real Estate Partners L.L.C., a New York-based limited partnership, would buy the land from Chevron Corp. Last year, Chevron said it had a tentative agreement to sell a portion of its vast California real estate holdings to an investor group that included a division of the investment bank Morgan Stanley & Co. and local home builder Christopher Gibbs. Under the new agreement, Morgan and Gibbs would purchase some properties, including a 480-acre site in Huntington Beach and another in La Habra from Chevron, but Lennar would purchase Coto instead of Morgan and Gibbs. The deal is scheduled to close this week.