Left to right: Ryan Anderson, Co-Founder and Co-President of Platform Ventures, Terry Anderson, Co-Founder and Co-President of Platform Ventures, Jennifer Clarke Johnson, Founder and CEO of Olivia Clark Homes   

In a year already defined by a dramatic escalation in homebuilding mergers and acquisitions — punctuated by Apollo’s $1.2 billion move to merge The New Home Company and Landsea Homes — a quieter, more surgical deal closed today that signals just how deep and competitive the consolidation wave is cutting into U.S. housing’s next chapter.

Platform Ventures, the Kansas City-based private equity firm with a growing national housing footprint, has acquired Olivia Clarke Homes, a boutique, design-forward builder founded in 2020 and operating in five Dallas-Fort Worth communities.

The buyer is Scott Felder Homes, Platform's Central Texas flagship builder, with operations in Austin, San Antonio, and Denver (via McStain Neighborhoods). Olivia Clarke will continue under its original name, and founder Jennifer Johnson will remain onboard to lead the integration and local operation.

From Boutique Roots to Growth Catalyst

The story of Olivia Clarke Homes is itself an outlier. Launched by Jennifer Johnson — a veteran of Shaddock Homes and Goodman Homes — in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the brand was built on a mix of intimate customer care, design that feels lived-in from the moment a buyer walks through the door, and operational know-how honed across decades in DFW land, sales, and development trenches.

Jennifer has built a wonderful company and creates fantastic working relationships with DFW developers,” says Tony Avila, CEO of Builder Advisor Group, which served as exclusive advisor on the deal. “She will be a critical success factor in the performance of the combined company going forward.”

Johnson’s product focus — classically styled, storage-rich, spatially intuitive homes — struck a chord with DFW’s increasingly discerning buyers. More notably, it offered something many large-scale builders struggle to replicate: emotional relevance in a time of economic uncertainty. As interest rates soared and buyer hesitance took hold, Johnson’s homes — and the way she and her team sold them — gained traction as an experience-first brand in a volume-first market.

Platform’s Expanding Homebuilding Empire

For Platform Ventures, this acquisition extends an increasingly clear strategic pattern: build a geographically diverse portfolio of operationally excellent, culturally distinctive builders in housing’s most durable regional economies. The firm’s existing holdings include:

• Scott Felder Homes (Austin/San Antonio)
• McStain Neighborhoods (Denver)
• Santa Rita Ranch (Austin master plan)
• Inspired Homes (Kansas City)

What unites these disparate entities is not a national brand overlay or a singular architectural signature, but a quietly disciplined thesis: support builder partners who understand their customers, have local land advantage, and can scale profitably with the right capital partner behind them.

From our earlier conversation with co-president Terry Anderson.

Our mantra going back to the beginning has been, 'stay opportunistic all the time,'" says Platform Ventures co-president Terry Anderson, who notes that the firm has $2.7 billion of assets under management across its four key sectors. "We're going to move our simple, nimble plan to bring more firms into the family. We've got a 40-person team doing the research and leading the charge on acquisitions, and $100s of millions to work with. There are a lot of really well-run family-owned businesses in this sector, with the capability of standing out, running profitably, and growing fast once the market turns more favorable in the next year or two. We love this space."

This approach differs markedly from some of the high-leverage roll-ups of the past decade. Platform’s patient capital posture — allowing local leadership to flourish, not just cut costs — is positioning it as a new breed of acquirer: part strategic, part financial, but fully focused on long-term value.

As the firm’s own investment pitch states, the target is operators “with strong brands and management teams in markets demonstrating favorable demographic tailwinds and market fundamentals.” Olivia Clarke fits the description precisely.

The team at Platform has made very prescient investments in homebuilders," Avila says. "We are honored to work with them."

Cultural Fit and Market Timing

A central theme of today’s deal is cultural alignment. Scott Felder Homes president and CEO Steve Krasoff emphasized the importance of bringing Johnson and her team into the fold.

This acquisition aligns perfectly with our long-term strategy,” said Krasoff in a provided statement. “With Olivia Clarke Homes, we are gaining valuable expertise and talent, and expanding our community footprint to better serve our customers.”

Johnson’s decision to sell now, according to sources familiar with the deal, was rooted less in scale pressure and more in access — access to land, to resources, and to operational support that would allow her company to grow responsibly without losing its identity.

The capital constraints it takes to grow the company are just enormous in home building, and I think that’s what’s driven the M&A activity across the country," Johnson tells The Builder's Daily. "That’s exactly what our strategy was. Because, you know, we originally what we raised to grow the company—the whole landscape changed.”

In this case, it became a partnership worth sealing.

A Market Sorting Itself

The backdrop for this transaction is a homebuilding sector undergoing one of the most significant realignments since the early 2000s. Call it natural selection or market sorting, but the outcomes are increasingly binary: players with access to capital, scale, and strategic alignment grow — and those without risk fading.

This is not a collapse; it’s a reordering. Private equity firms like Platform Ventures, Apollo, and others now see residential development as one of the few real estate segments with sustained structural demand and a credible long-term yield profile. As commercial, office, and retail real estate face secular headwinds, housing remains the most investible category in the built environment.

And yet, within housing itself, the fragmentation of the industry means opportunity for consolidation remains massive.

What this deal and others like it make clear is that private equity’s role in homebuilding is maturing. This isn’t fast-money flipping of distressed assets. It’s a careful bet that well-run regional brands, backed by the right capital and operating discipline, can outperform.

Though initially skeptical of engaging with a private equity–backed buyer, Clarke Johnson says the people behind Platform Ventures and Scott Felder Homes changed her perspective.

This wasn’t just about numbers,” she says. “It was about alignment—how they view their people, and how we both understand that what we’re building isn’t a commodity. It’s a family’s dream.”

The Appeal of DFW

Dallas-Fort Worth is arguably the hottest battleground for this next phase of M&A. With a fast-growing population, an economic base spanning logistics, tech, healthcare, and finance, and pro-growth housing policy, DFW offers scale and complexity in equal measure.

Clarke Johnson likens the Dallas-Fort Worth housing market to the SEC in college football—intensely competitive, talent-rich, and not for the faint of heart.

It’s where everybody wants to play,” she says, adding that the Olivia Clarke brand’s ability to carve out a position there made it a compelling match for Scott Felder’s expansion strategy.

What Olivia Clarke Homes brings to the Platform Ventures portfolio is more than just a beachhead in the Metroplex. It’s brand equity, land developer goodwill, and a trusted operating culture — all difficult to replicate from scratch in a hyper-competitive market.

Johnson's decision to remain to lead the operation is significant. In today’s homebuilding M&A, continuity of leadership — especially when the acquired brand carries significant personal trust and local knowledge — can be a make-or-break factor for long-term integration success. Especially someone in Jennifer's career trajectory.

From her first conversation about a possible transaction, Clarke Johnson says she leaned heavily on the guidance of Builder Advisor Group’s CEO Tony Avila and President Zach Legge.

I’ve never sold a company before,” she says. “They were with me every step of the way.”

Why It Matters

For homebuilding strategists, this deal checks multiple boxes:

• A capitalized player with a disciplined long-term thesis
• A regional operator with differentiated product and a strong team
• A market (DFW) that remains a magnet for investment and talent
• A trend (hybrid financial-strategic buyers) that’s only accelerating

It also reflects a market where buyers are nervous, and where builders with the ability to inspire confidence — by virtue of design, experience, and clarity — will increasingly win.

In that light, today’s deal is less about consolidation for its own sake, and more about positioning for the next phase of competition. Platform Ventures isn’t just acquiring lots and floorplans. It’s acquiring trust — from developers, from consumers, and from a team that knows how to compete when the stakes are high.

As Tony Avila puts it,

Jennifer will be a critical success factor in the performance of the combined company going forward.”

That’s what this moment in housing is about: not just who has capital, but what kind of partner can put it to work with discipline, insight, and care. Olivia Clarke Homes found that partner in Scott Felder and Platform Ventures.

More such matches are on the way.