Great Southern Homes to become public company.

Great Southern Homes Inc., one of the most highly visible homebuilders in the state, is going public.

The Irmo company with building projects most of them large housing developments throughout South Carolina and some in Georgia announced today that it has entered an agreement with DiamondHead Holdings Corp., a special purpose acquisition company.

The transaction values the combined company at a pro forma enterprise value of approximately $572 million, as of December 31, 2022.

When the transaction is completed, Great Southern Homes will become a publicly traded company, and DiamondHead Holdings Corp. will be renamed United Homes Group Inc., according to a news release. DiamondHead is expected to remain listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market and is expected to trade under the new ticker symbol "UHG."

GSH is one of the largest homebuilders in the Southeast. The company builds homes focused on the entry level buyers and those moving up for the first time, the company says.

GSH plans to employ a capital-efficient "land-light" operating model that it expects to generate higher returns with lower cyclical risk compared to traditional homebuilding operating models, the news release said. The land-light approach allows the company to control land supply primarily through lot option contracts versus carrying lot inventory on-balance sheet. Through organic growth, GSH has become the 25thranked starter-home builder and the 41stranked single-family detached home builder in the United States, respectively, based on 2021 home closings, according toPro Builder's 2022 Housing Giants Report.

DiamondHead is a special purpose acquisition company led by Co-CEO and Chairman David Hamamoto, who was the founder and chairman of the previously publicly-traded NorthStar real estate related companies: NorthStar Realty Finance Corp., NorthStar Asset Management Group Inc. and NorthStar Realty Europe Corp. He was a former partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and the co-founder of its Real Estate Principal Investment Group and Whitehall funds.

DiamondHead is co-sponsored by Antara Capital, an event-driven hedge fund founded by Himanshu Gulati.

Founded by Michael Nieri, Great Southern Homes and its predecessors have have built more than 11,000 homes. Population growth and single-family starts in the company's Georgia and S.C. markets have outpaced the national average since 2017, the news release pointed out.

"For over 20 years I have worked to build GSH into the leading Southeast...