A short seller's account of late-quarter home sales to spin-off Millrose Properties has put a checkable number at the center of the debate, and Berkshire Hathaway's latest filing shows it added shares in the same days.
Lennar shares fell 6.73% on Monday to $74.44, their lowest close since October 2022, extending a slide that began Friday when a short seller questioned the homebuilder's dealings with Millrose Properties, the land-banking company Lennar spun off in early 2025.
Over the two sessions, Lennar lost 9.3% of its value, falling from $82.11 on Thursday. Millrose dropped 8.53% on Monday to $22.51.
The trigger was a report published Friday by Hunterbrook Media, whose affiliated fund disclosed short positions in both companies. By Hunterbrook's count, built from property records, Millrose acquired upward of 700 completed Lennar houses in 15 states over about a month, a tally it values near $200 million. It puts at least 356 of those closings in the final week of August, which was also the last week of Lennar's fiscal third quarter. The short seller also contends Millrose paid roughly 13% above what retail buyers paid once incentives are counted.
Lennar and Millrose each declined to comment when asked about the specifics.
What the filings show
Part of the dispute can be tested against Lennar's own disclosures. The company reported 20,840 home deliveries for the quarter, "within our guidance of 20,500 to 21,500." That puts deliveries 340 homes above the low end of the range.
Hunterbrook's count of 356 late-quarter purchases by Millrose is larger than that 340-home margin. The short seller's argument rests on that comparison. Whether any of those homes were counted in Lennar's delivery total, and when each sale closed, has not been established by either company, and the count comes from Hunterbrook alone.
Other facts are documented. On , Lennar and Millrose amended their founding agreement, and Millrose amended its management agreement, including the scope of its investment guidelines, changes disclosed in a regulatory filing on . Lennar had $1.3 billion of deposits and pre-acquisition costs tied to option contracts with Millrose at the end of August. Stuart Miller held 43.2% of the combined voting power in Millrose as of March.
How big is it?
Scale cuts the other way. Hunterbrook's own $200 million estimate amounts to about 2.6% of Lennar's $7.73 billion in third-quarter home sales revenue. Analysts at BTIG estimated the purchases at about 2% of Millrose's invested capital. KBW analysts wrote that the report "raises questions regarding the composition of 3Q deliveries."
The market's verdict was harsher than the size alone would suggest. Lennar's 6.73% drop compared with a 1.22% decline in the homebuilder ETF and a 1.31% fall in D.R. Horton, leaving roughly 5.5 percentage points of underperformance specific to Lennar. Rates weighed on the whole group; Lennar's extra decline stands apart from that.
Berkshire's bid
Berkshire Hathaway, Lennar's largest outside holder, kept buying. A filing late Monday showed Berkshire bought 2,403,609 Class A shares on and , at weighted average prices between $78.37 and $81.90, or roughly $191.5 million. That included about 1.70 million shares on , the day the report appeared. Berkshire now holds about 28.4 million Class A shares. The filing does not show the time of each trade, so it is not possible to say how much was bought after the report was published.
What will resolve the debate
Lennar has guided to 22,000 to 23,000 deliveries in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ends , after already cutting its full-year target. That number, and any disclosure by either company quantifying Millrose's purchases of finished homes, will settle what Monday's sell-off could not. Until then, investors are weighing a disclosed short seller's count against Lennar's own reported numbers.