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A real estate developer in Durham, N.C., has filed for bankruptcy protection for a second time, the Triangle Business Journal reported. Ramarama Inc. filed for chapter 11 protection this month, listing both assets and liabilities as ranging between $1 million and $10 million. Ramarama, led by Mark Bullock, has filed for bankruptcy in the past. But it’s a new day this time around, says Ramarama’s attorney, Joseph Frost. “Past performance is not indicative of the future results and successes of Ramarama through this chapter 11 bankruptcy filing,” he said in an email, adding that his client is “committed” to repaying its creditors in a way that maximizes the value of its two development projects in downtown Durham. Those projects, according to Frost, are on Ellis Road and Roxboro Street. Bullock has a history of investing in Durham properties. In 2018, he bought the former Harriet Tubman YWCA on Umstead Street. However, he failed to pay property taxes for the site, and nonprofit firm Reinvestment Partners purchased it with plans to build affordable housing. Multiple Durham properties are tied to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of liabilities included in the latest bankruptcy case, including addresses on Ellis Road, Roxboro Street and Ramseur Street.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Norwich filed a reorganization plan on Tuesday to settle the Diocese’s chapter 11 reorganization case. One element of the plan is to sell the land where Saint Bernard School is located, Fox61.com reported. Part of the bankruptcy process, which has been going on for more than 18 months, is to create a fund to compensate survivors of abuse. Officials with the diocese said, "Under the proposed Plan, the Diocese and other entities will establish a Trust with funding in the amount of approximately $29 million. This Trust will provide financial restitution for survivors of sexual abuse who filed claims in the Diocese bankruptcy case." The diocese said over 140 claims of abuse were received before the deadline. Officials at Saint Bernard School said they learned the diocese is proposing to sell the entire parcel of land in Uncasville on which the school sits. It is expected that any proposed sale tentatively will include the option for the school to lease back the land, with favorable terms, for some period of time.

City National Bank, a unit of Royal Bank of Canada, agreed to commit more than $31 million to boost lending to Black and Hispanic home buyers in the Los Angeles area, in the U.S. Department of Justice's largest settlement over illegal redlining, Reuters reported. Yesterday's settlement was part of Attorney General Merrick Garland's Combatting Redlining Initiative, launched in Oct. 2021 to combat housing discrimination. The Justice Department accused City National of violating the federal Fair Housing Act by having "avoided" serving majority-Black and majority-Hispanic neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area between 2017 and 2020. City National, the largest bank based in Los Angeles, was accused of letting staff generate loan applications largely from its disproportionately white customer base instead of reaching out to Black and Hispanic people, and ignoring internal reports that suggested shortcomings in its fair lending practices. The complaint said just 7% of City National's residential mortgage loans in the region went to residents of majority-Black and Hispanic census tracts, compared with 44% of loans by its peers, and that more loans in those tracts went to white people. Under a five-year consent order, City National will commit at least $29.5 million, with the goal of making mortgage and home improvement loans more widely available in majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

Forma Brands LLC, the parent company of beauty retailer Morphe LLC, filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Thursday as it reached a deal with lenders including Jefferies and Cerberus Capital Management, Bloomberg News reported. As part of the agreement, secured creditors will take over Forma’s wholesale operations, online platforms and international Morphe retail stores while providing $33 million of new money, subject to court approval, according to a company statement. The court filing caps a tumultuous two-and-a-half years for the San Francisco-based company that failed to see revenues grow in spite of marketing deals with youtubers and influencers. The retailer recently announced that it would shutter all of Morphe’s retail locations in the U.S. It had to cut ties with two of its big three influencers and wrestle with a litany of litigation for missed rent and vendor payments. Forma has between $500 million and $1 billion in liabilities, according to court documents.

Owners of office buildings stumbled through 2022, when their holdings underperformed most every other type of commercial real estate. Things look poised to get worse in 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported. Landlords have been longing for employees to head back to office buildings in greater numbers. But the national return rate has crept up slowly. For the past three months, it has plateaued at about half of what it was before the pandemic. Now, a possible recession is making the outlook for 2023 even gloomier. New business searches for new office space, after rebounding in 2021, fell in 2022 to 44% of what they were in 2018 and 2019, according to VTS, a firm that operates a data platform that tracks tenant demand. Companies are cutting back on office space because they are in a “reduce expense mode,” said Ryan Masiello, VTS’s chief strategy officer and co-founder. “Everyone is starting to prepare for a pretty rough 2023.”

The housing market slump deepened in November as sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed for the tenth consecutive month — the longest such stretch on records going back to 1999, the Associated Press reported. Existing home sales fell 7.7% last month from October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.09 million, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. That’s a slower sales pace than what economists had expected, according to FactSet. Sales plunged 35.4% from November last year. Excluding the steep sales downturn that occurred in May 2020 at the start of the pandemic, sales are now at the slowest annual pace since November 2010, when the housing market was mired in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s. Still, home prices continued to rise last month, though at a far smaller rate than just a few months ago. The national median home sales price rose 3.5% in November from a year earlier, to $370,700.