Word that Eastwood Homes would acquire Atlanta-based Peachtree Building Group on Tuesday came as any private-to-private combination might.
An energized, well-led, fast-growing Carolinas-based private homebuilder was expanding its reach and deepening its foothold in one of America’s most strategically attractive housing markets.
What we learn as the story behind the transaction – the one that emerged in exclusive conversations Wednesday with Eastwood Homes CFO Kevin Hutchins and Peachtree Building Group principal Doug Cotter – is what makes us love waking up and showing up at work each day.
Contrary to time-honored truisms that homebuilder M&A is always and only driven by the tangible land assets being traded, this one was not simply a land-and-lots deal.
Rather, the Eastwood-PBG deal speaks deeply of a strategic combination forged around two increasingly powerful forces reshaping American homebuilding: the urgent economics of scale and the enduring value of culture, trust, and good old you-know-it-when-you-see-it operating fit.
Those forces may explain why private-to-private transactions have become one of the most meaningful, if less flashy, dynamics in today’s homebuilding M&A environment.
According to JTW Advisors’ latest industry M&A analysis, private builders accounted for 39% of homebuilder acquisition activity in 2025 through April 2026 – surpassing public builder acquirers at 26% and Japanese strategic buyers at 30%.
That marks a striking shift in industry power dynamics.
And Eastwood’s Atlanta move offers a revealing case study in why.
Scale is no longer a public builder luxury
For years, the conversation about scale in homebuilding belonged primarily to the public builders.
The publics’ advantages need hardly be mentioned … again: lower capital costs, national purchasing leverage, deeper infrastructure, broader operating footprints, and the ability to spread overhead across much larger production platforms.
Private builders have counterpunched through the cycles. They seize on the off-market parcels, draft off the traffic-driving public communities’ promotions, play off price- and personalization, and product spec, with agility, entrepreneurial decision-making, intimate knowledge of local markets and cultural cohesion.
Inexorably, however, the math is forcing even private operators to confront a set of harsher realities: higher-for-longer capital costs, construction trade uncertainty in “datageddon,” direct cost inflation and volatility, cost-of-living-constrained households, and jittery people.
Scale has become operationally a non-negotiable.
“Atlanta – 30,000 to 40,000 permits a year – and you just got to have scale to get your part of the market here,” Hutchins said. “For us, this is part of our strategy to help move that forward and get scale.”
Hutchins’ take may apply to the specifics of the Eastwood-PBG combo, but it underscores more than Eastwood’s Atlanta ambitions.
A strategic shift has already taken hold among a growing class of well-capitalized multi-regional private builders that increasingly recognize scale not as nice-to-have, but as competitive table stakes.
Eastwood’s acquisition of Peachtree instantly transforms its Atlanta operating relevance.
The combination takes Eastwood from roughly 120 annual closings in Atlanta to something approaching 350-400 homes, depending on the production cadence.
If you think that’s just about bragging rights, consider this:
“When you look at scale, you look at operational scale – not employee scale,” Hutchins said. “We can now go to our trade partners and say, ‘Hey, Eastwood, we were doing 120 homes. Well, now with this acquisition, we’re up to close to 400 homes. What kind of pricing do I get today versus that? What kind of crews do I get today?’”
The Eastwood team’s ability to jump that fence may be among the most operationally important takeaways from this deal. Why? Scale is not merely about lower pricing.
It’s about the doors that open to a favored-nation partner whose business dashboard spans 12-, 18-, 24- and 36-month project commitments, investment, and operational horizons.
“It’s not only just from a reduction of what trades can do a little bit better on pricing,” Hutchins said, “but just as important are the crews that you get from those trades.”
Experienced operators understand exactly what Hutchins is getting at. Top builders – by volume – often secure top trade capacity. Smaller operators may get the same vendor – but they may see some differences in capability, responsiveness, scheduling priority … ultimately, first-time right velocity.
That translates directly into construction cycle time, customer experience, rework risk, warranty performance and margins.
Hutchins was equally direct about the broader strategic reality.
“Being relevant to trade partners, being relevant to banking partners, as a regional, there is really, really something there that we have to pay attention to.”
This is the real-world private homebuilders inhabit, and they’re taking to it like it’s their second nature. That’s because at a certain rung of the production homebuilding natural order, being too small has become expensive.
Sellers still care about more than price
If Eastwood’s logic centers on scale, Peachtree’s choice to sell to Eastwood reveals another critical – and highly complementary – dynamic in private-to-private dealmaking.
Doug Cotter made clear that financial terms alone were not the deciding factor.
“My partner and I, Scott Schmidt, are in that season of life where it was time to make a change,” Cotter said. “Our biggest concern was to make sure that if and when we made that change, we made it with a family-run company where our employees, who we love and want to take care of, could transition into a similar environment that we had.”
Doug Cotter’s punchline warms the heart.
“We wanted to keep them out of a meat grinder.”
That kind of language, nor even the conviction, doesn’t typically show up in M&A decks. For founder-led sellers, succession and exit are not purely financial decisions.
- They involve people.
- Legacy.
- Culture.
- Relationships built over decades.
Cotter doubled-down on the notion
“100% we wanted to merge or be bought out by a relational company, and not a transactional company,” he said.
That framing – relational versus transactional – may increasingly explain why some private sellers prefer strategic private buyers over public consolidators or institutional capital-backed alternatives.
Public builders may offer scale and financial firepower. Global strategic buyers may offer extraordinary capital depth and growth runway for an energized, entrepreneurial team.
Still, for many of the cycle-seasoned living-and-breathing-and-leading characters you’ll meet among homebuilding’s owners and stakeholders, founder-to-founder cultural alignment remains a distinct advantage for certain private acquirers.
The asset Eastwood was really buying: capability
The transaction, it should be noted, did include approximately 1,000 assets across land, pipeline and work-in-progress inventory. It also should be noted that that WIP significantly deepens Eastwood’s Atlanta operating position.
But Hutchins repeatedly emphasized that Eastwood was buying something arguably more valuable than land.
Local operating intelligence.
“The long-term play is that we have also found ourselves a very, very good and very, very capable development partner in the Cotters,” Hutchins said.
That relationship continues, with Cotter Properties remaining an active development partner. For Eastwood, that dramatically reduces one of the greatest “brain-damage” risks of expansion.
“Local talent, local knowledge,” Hutchins said, adding, “There’s a learning curve there that we’ve been able to really kind of move the needle on, and not – not have to, I hate to pay the dumb tax, but pay the dumb tax.”
That’s one of the hardest truths about geographic expansion. Buying land is the easy part. Understanding entitlement pathways, development economics, municipal expectations, and submarket execution risks in unfamiliar geographies is the hard part, where many organic expansion efforts pay a heavy, sometimes disastrous, dumb tax.
Eastwood’s acquisition appears designed to accelerate that learning curve by bringing proven, trusted, tried-and-true people on the ground.
Sophisticated private buyers are acting institutionally
Another revealing aspect of this transaction is how professionalized the process has become. This was not entrepreneurial, gut-instincts improvisation. It was institutional-grade execution.
Cotter credited Tony McGill – longtime Senior Managing Director and Head of Investment Banking at Zelman Associates – as instrumental in identifying Eastwood as the right strategic fit.
“When Eastwood was brought to us [by] Tony McGill … it was just a good place to mesh,” Cotter said. “I could have not done any of this without Tony. He was such a great asset to us.”
On the buy side, Eastwood leaned on JTW Advisors, led by CEO and founder Chris Jasinski. Hutchins described JTW as indispensable in handling a transaction of this scale. Williams Parker served as legal counsel.
Taken together, the deal reflects how serious private acquirers increasingly operate with the same advisory sophistication once associated mainly with institutional buyers.
That’s another marker of how much the landscape has evolved.
Joe Stewart’s enduring influence and impact
Even as Eastwood scales, Hutchins repeatedly returned to culture. And specifically, to Eastwood Homes founder Joe Stewart. Stewart remains an advisor to the business, bringing nearly 50 years of homebuilding experience to Eastwood’s leadership team.
“One of the things that he’s always preached … is that we’re going to do smart business or no business,” Hutchins said. “We are going to continue to grow our footprint without really sacrificing who we are as a builder,” Hutchins said.
That becomes harder as companies grow.
“When Justin and I started, we probably had 70 employees,” Hutchins said. “Today with this acquisition we’re up in the 450 range. It gets harder and harder to continue to preach that culture.”
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