Investors can’t resist the Sunshine State’s financial firms—and here’s why.

Florida-bank buyouts have consistently occurred at a premium compared with buyouts of banks in other states. From 2002 through 2007, deals nationwide were priced at 2.2 times book value, on average. The typical acquisition of a Florida-based bank, by contrast, was at 2.8 times book.

But the collapse of the housing market brought it all to an end. Florida banks might be bodacious gatherers of deposits. On the lending side, though, they have the disadvantage recently of being located in, well, Florida. As the housing market there collapsed beginning in 2007, so did the credit quality of the loans local banks wrote to finance it. In 2008, fully 60 percent of Florida banks lost money, the FDIC reports. As a group, Florida banks earned negative 1 percent on their assets last year. (That's no mean feat when the government subsidizes your funding.) In specific markets where the housing crackup has been most severe, the numbers are even uglier. Of the 20 banks headquartered in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties in southwestern Florida, for instance, 17 lost money.

Result: All of a sudden non-Florida banks (many of which have their own credit problems, remember) aren't so eager to buy their way into the market anymore.

Which gets us back to BankUnited. As noted, the company is the largest Florida-based FDIC-insured depository institution, with $15 billion in assets and $7.2 billion in deposits. That's not saying as much as you might think, by the way. The Florida market is dominated by huge out-of-staters such as Bank of America (BAC) and Wachovia (WB) (lately acquired by Wells Fargo). BankUnited comes in at just eighth as measured by deposit market share, with 2 percent of the market.

Still, the proto-empire-builder has to start somewhere. The winning bidder for the company is a consortium of private-equity investors headed by W.L. Ross, the distressed-asset investor, that includes Carlyle Group, Blackstone, and Centerbridge Partners. They're injecting $900 million in fresh capital into the bank and have installed John Kanas, the former CEO of North Fork Bancorp in New York, to run the place. The government will also take most of the losses on a pool of $10.7 billion of iffy assets.

The Ross group plans to use BankUnited as a vehicle to acquire additional banks and thrifts (and their deposits), both in and out of Florida, at what will presumably be a fraction of the prices acquirers were paying just a few years ago. Given the stressed nature of the Florida banking industry, in particular, the group can potentially put a lot of money to work in a short period of time.