Latter-day Saints turn $20B land bank into Sun Belt building spree

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is converting a land bank of at least 2.4 million acres into a coast-to-coast development operation, with Bloomberg's review of Reonomy property records, reported by The Real Deal, assessing those holdings at more than $20 billion—a figure that likely understates the church's footprint because of gaps in state records and investments made through partnerships. The work is split among Property Reserve, which owns offices, apartments and hotels; Land Reserve, which handles master-planned communities; and Farmland Reserve, which continues to manage farms and ranches. Since Ashley Powell took over Property Reserve in 2017, the number of deals the unit and an affiliate have completed has nearly doubled against the previous decade, according to Reonomy data. Real estate executives familiar with the church's transactions describe an investor with an unusually long time horizon, able to buy with cash and hold for decades.

The projects show what that acceleration means on the ground, often on land the church has held for decades. In Aurora, Colorado, the church is developing Tributary, a 960-acre site near Denver International Airport planned for more than 12,000 residents alongside retail, parks, a school and a fire station. Southwest of Austin, it has acquired nearly 3,000 acres with development rights for thousands of homes, while in the Phoenix area it is planning a community on about 4,000 acres held since the 1980s. The biggest is Sunbridge, being built with Tavistock Development on former Deseret Ranch land in Florida, where more than 1,400 homes are already completed and plans call for more than 36,000 homes and commercial space.

The expansion has brought local pushback. Sunbridge faces opposition over road construction, conservation and its reach into rural areas, and church-owned land elsewhere in Florida has raised concerns about flooding, traffic and pressure on resources. The church says its legacy agricultural holdings are becoming development sites as population growth arrives, and that its commercial portfolio is designed to produce long-term cash flow for its religious mission.

That long horizon gives the church an edge in a land market where most developers are balancing construction costs against fund terms and the need to deploy committed equity. An entity that never has to mark its acreage to market, answer to LPs, or meet a sale deadline can absorb approval fights and infrastructure expenses that would force a conventional sponsor to cut its losses. The church is now the developer of record on projects like Sunbridge, where the patience baked into its balance sheet is about to be tested by opposition over roads and conservation.