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The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday charged Jonathan Larmore, a Phoenix-based real-estate investor, with stock manipulation tied to a false tender offer for now-bankrupt WeWork, the Wall Street Journal reported. The SEC charges also allege that ArciTerra Companies, a real estate investment company, and Larmore, who is the company’s chief executive, misappropriated more than $35 million in managed funds over a number of years. The SEC alleges that Larmore had, since at least January 2017, used a “substantial portion” of misappropriated funds from ArciTerra for family members’ expenses and to fund a lifestyle that included private jets, yachts and expensive residences. Earlier this month, according to the SEC, Larmore and Cole Capital Funds, an entity created and controlled by Larmore, issued a press release saying the firm would purchase 51% of all minority ownership shares in WeWork for $9 a share. The offer, priced at more than nine times WeWork’s stock price at the time, prompted shares to more than double after-hours. Larmore allegedly purchased 72,000 call options in WeWork in the days before and planned to execute on the trades once the stock rose.

Bank of America agreed to pay a $12 million fine to settle U.S. regulatory charges that it routinely submitted inaccurate information about mortgage applicants to the federal government, violating a law that thousands of mortgage lenders have followed for decades, Reuters reported. The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said on Tuesday that more than 400 loan officers at the second-largest U.S. bank failed to ask applicants required questions about their race, ethnicity and sex, and then falsely reported that the applicants chose not to respond. Failing to accurately report demographic data violates the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, a 1975 law that helps regulators assess whether lenders are serving their communities' housing needs and are not engaged in discriminatory lending, the CFPB said. Bank of America did not admit or deny wrongdoing in accepting the civil fine, which covered alleged conduct between 2016 and 2021.

Sales of new U.S. single-family homes fell more than expected in October as higher mortgage rates squeezed out buyers even as builders cut prices, but the setback is likely temporary amid a persistent shortage of previously owned houses on the market, Reuters reported. The decline in sales reported by the Commerce Department on Monday was in line with a recent deterioration in homebuilder sentiment, which came as the rate on the popular 30-year fixed-mortgage approached 8%, leaving builders anticipating slower buyer traffic. Mortgage rates have since retreated from two-decade highs and are at levels last seen in late September, which could pave the way for a rebound in sales. "The market for new homes remains very solid by any historical standard and continues to be boosted by extremely low existing home inventory," said Daniel Vielhaber, an economist at Nationwide in Ohio. New home sales dropped 5.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 679,000 units last month, the Commerce Department's Census Bureau said. September's sales pace was revised lower to 719,000 units from the previously reported 759,000 units.

WeWork said on Tuesday that it had secured commitments for up to $682.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing from some of its lenders, weeks after the shared office space provider filed for bankruptcy protection, Reuters reported. The SoftBank-backed company is seeking to address more than $4 billion in debt and unsustainable future rent costs through a bankruptcy plan. WeWork, once the most valuable U.S. startup, struggled to achieve profitability as a rise in work-from-home trends following the pandemic soured demand for its shared office spaces. In a regulatory filing, WeWork disclosed it had entered into a commitment letter on Nov. 15 with parties including Goldman Sachs International Bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 for the financing of a letter-of-credit facility. The financing could be as much as $682.5 million but it could also be smaller than that depending on other conditions, WeWork said, adding that the parties have agreed to provide the financing individually and not jointly.

There are hundreds of "zombie" malls throughout the U.S. that are more dead than alive, the Wall Street Journal reported. The older, low-end ones have lost at least half and, in some cases, more than 70% of their value since the industry’s peak in late 2016, according to real-estate research firm Green Street. As values fall below the balances of their outstanding debt, owners usually stop paying the mortgages and look to either renegotiate with their lenders or hand back the keys. Green Street estimates about 150 enclosed malls have closed since the supply peaked in 2008, leaving about 950 remaining today. The firm predicts more than a third of these will close over the next 15 to 20 years. Read more. (Subscription required.)

Occupancy issues are at the heart of many significant retail cases, as detailed in the ABI publication Retail and Office Bankruptcy: Landlord/Tenant Rights, available at the ABI Store.

Some owners of WeWork Inc.’s more than 700 properties are objecting to the company’s plans to shut down many of its locations in bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. Objections filed yesterday pushed back on the company’s timeline for rejecting leases, and rules they say wrongly favor WeWork. For example, one landlord claims WeWork would retain the right to stay in a location, even after canceling a lease. The filings provide a fresh look at the delicate balance WeWork must strike as it seeks to renegotiate or shed onerous leases, a key part of its bankruptcy plan. It’s in talks with landlords for hundreds of properties about rent cuts and other concessions, and must be careful not to push so aggressively that landlords choose to walk away and seek new occupants. “WeWork is walking a fine line because it has to aggressively cut rent costs in order to reorganize successfully, but at the same time its future depends on maintaining healthy relationships with some of those same landlords if it hopes to strike new agreements with them after emerging from bankruptcy, ” said Evan DuFaux, a special situations analyst at the research firm CreditSights. “The case is likely to turn on the landlords’ strategy regarding renegotiation and rejection of leases.” Regulatory filings show that plans during bankruptcy discussions with creditors involved shuttering nearly half of its U.S. and Canadian locations. The company hasn’t shared new figures since filing for chapter 11, but said in a response to questions from Bloomberg that the disclosed numbers were “outdated” and didn’t reflect the “significant progress” made in talks since then.