The nation’s largest homebuilder has picked a community in Chesterfield County to stake its first claim in the Richmond housing market.

D.R. Horton purchased 48 lots in two sections of Midlothian’s Collington development. The Texas-based builder paid $4.58 million in a multi-parcel deal that closed Feb. 9.

Thirty-seven of the lots will fill Section 16, the southernmost section of the 1,200-acre community off Winterpock Road south of Hull Street Road. The remaining 11 lots are in Section 17, a middle section shared with other builders such as Stanley Martin Homes.

The latest Chesterfield County assessment valued each of the 1-acre lots at $74,000, according to county property records. That brings the lots’ collective assessed value to just over $3.55 million.

The deal marks the first local land purchase for D.R. Horton, a $14 billion company publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company confirmed in December it’s extending its reach to Central Virginia, where it was hiring eight positions specific to the Midlothian area.

D.R. Horton is applying for permits and plans to begin construction in Collington next month, a spokeswoman said Wednesday. A model home is tentatively planned to open in early May.

The spokeswoman did not say which of the company’s home products will be built in Collington. It focuses primarily on single-family homes for entry-level homebuyers and has a family of brands that includes Emerald Homes, Express Homes, Freedom Homes and Pacific Ridge Homes.

Its homes range in size from 1,000 to upwards of 4,000 square feet, at prices ranging from $100,000 to more than $1 million. For the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, D.R. Horton’s brands sold more than 45,700 homes with an average closing price of $298,400, according to SEC filings.

With $14.1 billion in revenue last fiscal year, D.R. Horton is the largest homebuilder in the U.S. measured by revenue and number of homes closed. It has been ranked the country’s biggest homebuilder by Builder Magazine since 2002.

At Collington, a community by developer Doug Sowers, D.R. Horton joins local builders Anderson Custom Homes, CraftMaster Homes, Main Street Homes and S.C. Legacy Builders, as well as Reston-based national brands Ryan Homes and Stanley Martin Homes, which entered the Richmond market in 2014.

Sowers, whose other communities include Newmarket and RounTrey, the latter with his son Danny Sowers, said he is happy to host D.R. Horton in Collington.

“We wish them luck, and I hope that they succeed,” Sowers said. “The market seems to be going up, so I think everybody can do well.”

Sowers said Collington has been selling well over the past seven years, with 750 homes built and another 400 planned. He said he’s also opening up another 100 lots in Newmarket and 127 lots in RounTrey this year.