The CEO of FivePoint Holdings is stepping down amid a shakeup at one of the largest — and most polarizing — homebuilders in California.
Emile Haddad, 63, will exit the position at the end of September, the company announced Monday.
FivePoint was formed in 2009 by Lennar, the Miami-based construction giant, to manage its California projects. FivePoint was then spun off, and the firm went public in 2017. Lennar has remained its largest stakeholder and currently controls 39 percent of shares.
Haddad’s departure is part of a broader executive reshuffling at the firm. The board of directors elected Lennar executive chairman Stuart Miller to the same role at FivePoint; and FivePoint COO Lynn Jochim was promoted to president.
Haddad will remain on the board, serving as chairman emeritus, and will become a senior adviser at the firm. He will also receive a monthly retainer of over $400,000, according to FivePoint’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The firm is not naming a new chief executive.
“I wasn’t fired,” Haddad told the Orange County Register. He called the move a “repositioning for us to move forward and create the right value for the company…. At some point in time, you need to start realizing that there are other things that you can focus on.”
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The leadership change comes as FivePoint — best known as the developer behind the 10,000-home Great Park Neighborhoods in Orange County — is pushing forward with enormous projects throughout California.
Among its most controversial is FivePoint Valencia in the Santa Clarita Valley. Formerly called Newhall Ranch, the massive, bitterly-contested planned community has been decades in the making. It is slated to eventually include 21,000 homes and 11.5 million square feet of commercial space.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, FivePoint has been embroiled in a legal fight related to the potential release of toxic pollutants at a another planned community of several thousand homes. The proposed complex is located at Hunters Point, a 638-acre former Navy shipyard in southeast San Francisco.
Adjacent to the shipyard, FivePoint is also developing a 7,000-home community called Candlestick Point. Approved plans for that project, on the site of the San Francisco Giants’ former stadium, include more than 1 million square feet of office and retail space and a 220-room hotel. FivePoint has recently been in talks with the city over revisions.
In Irvine, the Orange County Great Park was envisioned in the mid-2000s as a kind of “Central Park of the West Coast.” FivePoint’s development is designed around the perimeter of the public park and includes eventual plans for over 10,000 homes spread among a half dozen different neighborhoods, as well as athletic and other facilities.
A FivePoint representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.