Mehrdad Moayedi follows rival Kyle Bass into ranch country

Mehrdad Moayedi’s Centurion American has added a historic Texas ranch to its stable.

Southfork Ranch, once the backdrop of the Ewing family drama on the famous television series Dallas in the 1970s, now belongs to the Farmers Branch-based company. Centurion says it plans to use part of the 241-acre property in the town of Parker for a new neighborhood of custom homes, according to the Dallas Morning News.

The Collin County property was previously managed by Forever Resorts, whose founder, businessman Rex Maughan, had owned the ranch since 1992. Though the price and terms of the sale were not disclosed, the location—Parker, Texas— is known for its expansive homes that go for a minimum of $1 million.

“We are looking forward to working with the city of Parker to determine the future of this historic property,” CEO Mehrdad Moayedi said in a prepared statement. “Southfork Ranch is one of the most important and beloved parcels of land in the metroplex with more than 400,000 visitors each year, and we’re proud to lead the team bringing it into its next evolution.”

While the company plans to preserve the landmark house, it also has want to include “larger residential lots, although the size and number will be determined in conjunction with discussions with the city of Parker.”

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Moayedi has been very active in the rural Texas markets as of late with plans for a 30,000-home community in Celina, another outlying market of Dallas-Fort Worth. He’s also spent time in the courts recently, battling a class-action lawsuit and a citation for failure to pay school taxes. On top of that, Hollis Greenlaw, who formerly owned a private jet with Moayedi, was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for running an alleged ponzi scheme through her company, United Development Funding.

Kyle Bass, founder of Hayman Capital Management who shorted shares of UDF, wrote extensively about the ties between Moayadi and Greenlaw as Centurion was the recipient of many UDF loans. Bass alleged that Centurion defaulted on a number of these loans— a fact that UDF deliberately hid from its investors. During the trial in 2020, Bass attended a hearing about Centurion’s development delays and attempted to acquire a stake in several Centurion projects, saying it was “an opportunity to invest in distressed real estate projects.”

“Hayman Capital is a sideshow,” Moayedi said. “It’s a joke to even be here.” Moayedi said in a subsequent phone call that the projects Bass invested in weren’t distressed and that the accusations of fraud were bogus. “We’ve kept ourselves clean,” he said, according to a BNN Bloomberg exposé in 2020.

Bass, who made about $30 million on his bet against Greenlaw and Moayedi, recently embarked on rural land play himself. His new investment firm Conservation Equity Management has spent the last year buying up six rural properties totaling 37,000 acres worth more than $90 million.

— Maddy Sperling