Mehrdad Moayedi’s rise mirrors the story of the city he played a leading role in shaping: Both were plopped into the middle of the North Texas prairie without much by way of resources. They figured out how to harness the wave of growth, resist its undertow and get really, really big.
Moayedi was 15 when he left Tehran for a small suburb of Fort Worth in 1976. He made the move ahead of his mother and stepfather, an Air Force pilot who worked at Bell Helicopter, transferring from a small Seventh Day Adventist academy in Iran to a high school with 2,500 students that could have inspired a “Friday Night Lights” set.
He still remembers his first day at L.D. Bell High School: he showed up to what must’ve been a sea of denim bellbottoms in a dress shirt and tie. He was scared.
It didn’t last long. Moayedi ditched the tie but kept his Persian last name. He made a ton of friends, played sports, converted to Christianity and, over the course of 50 years, became arguably the most prolific single-family lot developer in North Texas.
Despite being many miles from a coastline or useful riverway, Dallas-Forth Worth has grown like a weed during Moayedi’s time here. Between 1970 and 2025, its population more than tripled from 2.4 million to 8.6 million. Satellite imagery timelapse shows the region unfolding in all directions with notable visible changes at the end of each year.
Throughout his career, his Farmers Branch-based firm Centurion American Development Group has developed more than 200,000 lots spanning about 75,000 acres. This year, the firm purchased 1,100 acres for a project in Grayson County, 630 acres for a community in north Fort Worth and 550 acres as part of the Preston Harbor development on Lake Texoma.
If you combined all Moayedi’s communities into one, the expanse would almost cover the city of Philadelphia. But they’re not contiguous. Instead, the wall-sized map in the company’s conference room shows Centurion American dots in every growth corridor of the ever-expanding region.
While single-family lot development and master-planned communities make up the majority of his business today, he’s also dabbled in condo development, historic preservation and adaptive reuse.
The tale of his rise has a cast of big real estate players. D.R. Horton co-founder Terry Horton took him to church on Sundays. Herman Smith, the Fort Worth developer who was president of the National Association of Homebuilders, gave him landscaping jobs.
Moayedi is known for his affability, but you don’t get to where he’s sitting without picking up some rivals. His foes are heavy-hitters, too, like Kyle Bass, the hedge fund manager featured in Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short,” who has spent years trying to uncover what he believes are fraudulent dealings between Centurion American and a former lender, United Development Fund IV.
Moayedi has faced his share of legal scrutiny, some ongoing, but he’s so far emerged unscathed, allowing him to earn a place among the icons who mentored him.
“There will never be another one of him,” said Trevor Kollinger, Centurion American’s vice president of finance and development and the closest Moayedi has to an appointed successor.
Moayedi wouldn’t be able to typify “the developer” in a place that valorizes the red-blooded, denim-clad cowboy without getting the buy-in of the OGs. He respects their roots.
Take Sean Terry, the tobacco-spitting former mayor of Celina who handles land entitlements for Centurion American and is his family’s sixth generation in Collin County.
“I do have respect for him in a different way, because his parents settled here. They did all the hard work to make this what it is. I do owe them something, and for that reason, I’m very mindful of it,” Moayedi said.
Still, Terry insists, his immigrant boss is “more American than I am.”
A gravitational personality
“The best motivation is poverty,” Moayedi said, so when the Iranian Revolution of 1978 wiped out his family’s financial stability, he dropped out of college at the University of Texas at Arlington and got to work.
He started a landscaping company, drawing on his experience doing lawns in high school. No one was paying attention to the greenery at spec houses at the time, so Moayedi proposed a deal: He’d do the yard, and the builder could pay him when the house sold.
That’s how he got connected with builders like Herman Smith and Don and Terry Horton, the men who would become his mentors. Ask him how chance meetings became lifelong relationships, and he makes it sound simple, “He took a liking to me.”
David Craig, his longtime friend and collaborator on the upcoming Preston Harbor development on Lake Texoma, highlights another factor in the equation: his ability to deliver.
“Believe me, you can’t accomplish that just by being friendly,” he said. “You have to perform and that’s what he’s done.”
Moayedi landed his first real development opportunity in the late ’80s. John Dees, the father of his friend Michael Dees, had this swath of land in Grapevine called Windsor Forest. Wanting to retire, the elder Dees gave Moayedi a shot at developing it. When he completed it, he was short $600,000. How was he going to quickly pay the debt? Another deal, of course.
“You may be working for technically nothing for five, six, seven, eight years, until you get to the final phase. That’s when the profits maybe start come rolling in, and you feel like maybe it was worthwhile for the first several years or so.”
He drove around the Metroplex, scouting. He discovered a 60-acre development site, cold-called the owner and was faced with a new challenge: a 15-day deadline to come up with $6 million to buy the land. One friend agreed to lend him the money, but when it wasn’t enough for the full cost of development, another friend — Herman Smith, the builder — connected Moayedi with another developer, who agreed to do the work and accept payment when Moayedi sold the lots.
“So, I didn’t have any money. Somebody gave me money from land. The other guy gave me the development money. I got it done. I did a good job with it. I sold everything. I paid the $600 [thousand] back. Now I had about half a million dollars cash and was off to the races,” Moayedi said.
Moayedi took business detours into infrastructure, manufacturing and utility work before settling his focus on development. He always comes back to the land, which, in his hands, becomes Centurion American’s signature master-planned communities. The transformation is satisfying to him.
“After I’m gone, my kids can drive by and say, ‘My dad built that,’” he said.
Moayedi’s legacy depends on his affability. His friends relay his unfailing generosity. Even a former partner who named him in a lawsuit couldn’t muster up anything bad to say about him, though whether that’s just good Texan manners is hard to say.
“Everything has translated back to relationships,” Kollinger said. “He has that gravitational personality that you feel right off the bat.” His Christmas party brings all his friends together. He used to hold the party in Downtown Dallas; since his 2022 purchase of Southfork Ranch in Parker, he now throws the bash there, in a mansion made famous by the show “Dallas.”
But he doesn’t operate like someone who knows he’s charming. He squirms in front of a camera and says what he means. He’s also got the emotional acuity of a man whose closest family members are women. He tears up talking about his mother, Behjat McElroy, who died in 2024, calling her “the smartest person I knew” and praises the skills of his sister Mahtab Moayedi, a developer based in California. He gushes about his two daughters, Lily and Sarah, both in college in California.
Once, he was swimming with friends in Grapevine Lake and came across a man who was living in his car with a baby. Moayedi invited them to stay at his house. The guy ended up working for Moayedi as a mason and eventually took over his masonry business.
Why would a guy in his twenties trying to make it in real estate offer up a room to a stranger? “It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he said.
Centurion American
Like any good Texan, Moayedi credits his success to the grace of God. As Moayedi tells it, God opened up deals for him and guided him through each challenge.
Invocations of the divine undersell how good he is at making deals.
“Mehrdad’s the consummate deal junkie,” said “King of Dirt” Rex Glendenning. The longtime friends have worked together for decades, most notably on the $4.5 billion Legacy Hills development in Celina.
Moayedi founded Centurion American Development Group in 1990. Today, the company has 155 employees. Master-planned communities form the bulk of the firm’s business.
The development process typically starts with Glendenning identifying a piece of raw land that he thinks would make a good site. If Moayedi agrees, the next step is to get the land entitled, which involves working with the local zoning commission and city council.
Moayedi was the first developer to use a financing model called a Public Improvement District (PID) after the state legislature authorized it in 2007, and he often creates this or similar public-private partnerships to offset the costs of infrastructure development. This whole process might take six months, Glendenning said. Then it’s time to bid out the infrastructure and build roads, add utilities and plan amenities centers.
Moayedi runs the bids against what builders will pay for lots to determine what’s profitable. That’s when homebuilder friends like D.R. Horton come into the picture — they purchase lots and then build and sell homes.
On a 1,000-acre deal, it can take 15 years to build a master-planned community. The profit doesn’t come until the end.
“You may be working for technically nothing for five, six, seven, eight years, until you get to the final phase,” Glendenning said. “That’s when the profits maybe start come rolling in, and you feel like maybe it was worthwhile for the first several years or so.”
These communities are Centurion American’s bread and butter, but he’s tried other ventures.
He made a splash more than a decade ago when he purchased the iconic Statler Hotel and Residences in downtown Dallas, drawn to the history of the landmark. The Statler had introduced consumers to amenities like elevator music and televisions in each room when it opened in 1956, registering Coco Chanel and Ike and Tina Turner as guests.
After closing in 2001, water damage and vandalism meant the hotel’s only visitors were of the rodent variety. Moayedi was the latest in a series of developers who tried to bring the gem back to life over the course of about a decade. With the help of nearly $50 million in incentives from the City of Dallas, he completed the $230 million project in 2017, turning the dilapidated structure into a 159-key hotel with 219 luxury multifamily units, revamped event space, restaurants and retail.
“That job has been probably one of the hardest jobs that I’ve done. I’ve hung in there, because it’s important to me for the city of Dallas,” he said.
He also bought the Residences at the Stoneleigh out of bankruptcy and finished out the condo tower. At the old Dallas Public Library, he converted the space into offices.
The firm’s largest projects are ahead. Centurion American is four years into the redevelopment of Collin Creek Mall, which Moayedi is transforming into a mixed-use development with more than 3,000 housing units, 1.3 million square feet of office space and 300,000 square feet of retail. He also has the $7 billion Lake Texoma project with Craig.
His process for picking what he works on outside of master-planned community development comes from instinct, some combination of emotion and logic.
“I kind of go by the seat of my pants,” Moayedi said.
It’s the same looseness for his own home purchases, and he buys and sells residences frequently. His office has a pool going on how long he’ll stay at the house he moved into less than a year ago in Highland Park. The wagers are in months.
“I get bored of things,” he said.
A system that works for him
Moayedi and DFW wouldn’t have had a prayer of such large-scale impact without the state’s signature pro-business ethos.
That, combined with the boost he’s gotten from mentors and his natural inclination to help others, have made Moayedi into something of a gentleman’s capitalist. The system, as he sees it, works properly when people are free to make money and give it back.
“That’s what this country does. You look at most of the people in this country that are billionaires, 95 percent give it back in a good way,” he said.
He donates to causes related to war veterans with particular passion and has teamed up with community leaders like state Sen. Royce West to connect kids with professional mentors.
The worldview involves respect for local history. He’s aware that longtime North Texans could perceive him as an outsider swooping in and capitalizing off the hard work of people who’ve invested in their communities here for centuries.
“Some people could think, ‘Hey, who is this guy to benefit off our fathers and grandfathers?’ I’m very humble about it, and also I know that I’ve been given a right. I’ve been given a blessing, so I need to be right about it.”
All this makes him a Republican. But his geniality means his circle is wide; some of the “great men” in his life are Democrats, he said, and he gets along with them, too.
Moayedi, who purchased a jet from President Donald Trump in 2024, keeps evidence of his Trump support all over his office, including a half-dozen framed photographs with the president. The glittery lion’s-head sculpture on Moayedi’s desk wears a MAGA hat. (Not a diehard, he also displays a photo of himself with Mike Pence and a copy of Nikki Haley’s book.)
He plays an active role in preserving the state’s pro-developer conditions he credits for his success, donating handsomely to Republicans at every level of politics and even a few Democrats.
Moayedi’s political activity invited scrutiny over the summer when it became clear that he donated $25,000 to Tarrant County Commissioner Manny Ramirez and $10,000 to Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare in 2023 before seeking approval for a public improvement district in the county.
It doesn’t take an ethicist to question the optics. But this is Texas, a state where the legislator who spearheaded state property tax reform owns a company that helps people lower their tax bills, and the veil between business and politics can be thin.
On Bass’ bad side
The last 10 years have been Moayedi’s most successful but also some of his more private. He hasn’t really done the rounds in the press since completing the Statler in 2017.
The period of increased privacy coincided with a bruising public legal battle that drew Moayedi into the fray but hasn’t knocked him over.
Moayedi may not have many enemies, but the people who have issues with him are pretty persistent. One of them is Kyle Bass. In 2015, Bass started shorting stocks of United Development Fund IV, one of Centurion American’s lenders, based on allegations that the fund was a Ponzi scheme. Bass claimed UDF was using new investor money to pay existing investors in faltering earlier funds. He also argued UDF’s biggest borrower, Centurion American, was complicit. Bass also thought the two parties got too cozy, pointing to the fact that Moayedi once owned a jet with now-imprisoned former UDF CEO Hollis Greenlaw.
Bass called the Federal Bureau of Investigation with his evidence and presented his case anonymously on the website Harvest Exchange. His argument got picked up and made the rounds online, resulting in plummeting UDF shares, an FBI raid of UDF’s corporate offices and ultimately, a $30 million windfall to Bass.
Later, a federal jury convicted four UDF executives on 10 counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and securities fraud. They were sentenced to a combined 20 years in prison.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and FBI investigated the claims, and Moayedi was never charged with anything. Still, Bass was unsatisfied with the SEC’s findings and bought stakes in multiple Centurion American projects in an effort to do his own digging into the company.
He declined an interview for this story, writing in an email, “I’ve decided when I don’t have anything positive to say about someone … I shouldn’t say anything.”
The ordeal spurred additional legal challenges, including from Zack and Aaron Ipour, the founders of DFW homebuilder Megatel Homes. Megatel sued Moayedi in 2020, claiming UDF participated in a scheme to prop up Moayedi’s companies and defraud Megatel. The matter is still ongoing and will likely go to trial.
The Ipour brothers also sued to block the redevelopment of Collin Creek Mall, claiming they had the right of first refusal to buy the property. A jury ruled in favor of Moayedi, finding that Megatel had given up its priority.
Moayedi is also fighting a suit from Dallas-based REIT and UDF shareholder NexPoint on similar grounds to the wrapped-up FBI and SEC investigations. NexPoint claims Moayedi participated in an “elaborate scheme of fake transactions” in which UDF would make a loan to a new Centurion American project, whose proceeds Moayedi would use to make a payment due on a loan he’d taken out from UDF for an earlier project. Jeff Tillotson, the attorney for both clients, also represents Kyle Bass. “I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Moayedi, but the clients who’ve come to me have had interests averse to him,” Tillotson said to The Real Deal.
In a Nov. 18 filing, a Texas Supreme Court judge determined Texas doesn’t have jurisdiction over the matter and directed the court to dismiss the case.
Moayedi wasn’t afraid to jump into the fray to defend against the accusations, even issuing a statement at the time calling the Megatel suit “a sign of a desperate man grasping for a lifeline.” Today, he handles questions about the period with characteristic geniality.
“I’m one of those guys, I’ll take my punches, sit in front of people and do what I’ve gotta do. We were okay. God looked at it. The authorities looked at it,” he said.
He lets out a pained yelp and a dark chuckle when he recalls the legal bills involved in the court brawl. But his business quadrupled in the time period when the legal battle stretched on, he said.
What’s next
Moayedi doesn’t dwell much on the past though. When he isn’t working, he cheers on FC Dallas, the Dallas Cowboys and the Mavericks, or travels to California to visit his daughters. He’s rebuilding the Malibu home he bought in 2020 that was destroyed by the Palisades Fire in January. He recently took the longest vacation of his career, a 15-day trip to the south of France.
He doesn’t seem to ruminate about the future either.
If and when the founder steps back, Kollinger — the implied successor — imagines a board of directors could make decisions about the kind of one-off projects Moayedi pursued by gut or instinct. Kollinger himself would be comfortable leading the land development business, he said. It shows no sign of slowing, as master-planned community developments veer closer and closer to Oklahoma.
The best perspective on Moayedi’s impact comes as you make your final descent into the world’s third-busiest airport. From that vantage, the sea of rooftops arranges itself along suburban streets like dominoes, against a background of pavement and emerald backyards.
Not everyone adores the look of suburban sprawl. Moayedi shrugs off complaints about the aesthetics. He’s the land guy, not the architect.
“Price dictates what you can actually build,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of people sitting on the sidelines, being critical of things, but it’s very important to have a roof over your head, good schools, a place you can go hang out, parks and all that.”
