Vice President - Land Acquisition

Ashton Woods Homes is the nation’s largest private homebuilding company, with operations in Atlanta, Austin, Charleston, Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, San Antonio, and Tampa. Ashton Woods is known throughout the industry for building homes with award-winning designs that inspire and offer homebuyers unrivaled personalization options. Consistently named a top place to work, Ashton Woods offers growth potential, competitive salaries and benefits, and the opportunity to not just find a job, but build a career in a collaborative, authentic culture.

Position Overview

The VP of Land Acquisition is responsible for providing the division with undeveloped land and finished lots enabling it to accomplish its sales, settlements, profitability, and growth targets as established in the division strategic plan. Also Work with the leadership team to ensure our sales, marketing and construction requirements are met on each deal. Negotiate price and terms of property acquisitions to ensure the division has a competitive edge in our respective target submarkets. Manage zoning attorneys, our real-estate attorney, developers (both in house and outside), and local regulatory agencies to ensure that the division’s risks are eliminated or mitigated.

Responsibilities

• Actively look for niche land positions requiring direct contracting from owners, to include assemblage opportunities and joint venture scenarios.
• Participate in the creation of the division strategic land acquisition planning process. Help guide the process to competitive acquisition targets.
• Develop good contracts with the local developer community to provide the division with option deals in good subdivisions at competitive prices.
• Develop extensive broker connections so that we are seeing many new deals early in the selling process.
• Initiate the contract process, review all contract changes, oversee our attorney reviews and negotiations, identify major contractual risks (and their concurrent obligations), and ensure all our major deal point issues are addressed in each transaction.
• Lead the land acquisition department; ensure that it is competently staffed and functional.
• Manage our market knowledge and submarket analysis projects to ensure that we have current data on land prices, lot prices, absorption, selling times, schools, road improvements, utilities, sewer, job centers, competition, municipal requirements, and other data needed to develop and refine our strategic land acquisition objectives.
• Manage the land feasibility package creation process. Assemble the corporate land acquisition study book for each land deal and ensure that it is submitted at least two weeks prior to any earnest money “hard date”.
• Manage the zoning and permitting processes. Ensure that we get the best possible density and conditions from the process – ensure our contracts are linked to these results.
• Identify and submit to the Division Manager enough suitable deals in accordance with our strategic plan, to achieve financial objectives.

Qualifications

• Experience with Outlook, Excel, Word, Power Point, and ability to learn new programs.
• At least 5 years’ experience in residential land acquisition, divestiture, and development.
• Experience with blueprints, construction drawings and addendums.
• Bachelor’s degree in business, real estate, finance, or related field.
• Residential building industry experience preferred.