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A New York-based real estate lending company says it plans to foreclose on the Lloyd Center mall and redevelop the Northeast Portland shopping center, the Oregonian reported. KKR Real Estate Finance Trust said that it plans to take ownership of the 1.2 million square foot mall before the end of the year. The company says payments on its $110 million debt has been overdue since October 2020. KKR loaned $177 million toward a renovation of the Lloyd Center in 2015. Lloyd Center opened in 1960 as a 100-store, open-air mall, said at the time to be the largest in the world. It was covered in the 1980s with a glass ceiling, then extensively renovated in the 1990s into a more traditional enclosed shopping mall with a central food court. The mall launched another ambitious renovation in 2014, spending tens of millions to refresh the mall’s interior. The mall has nonetheless struggled to turn things around. Major tenants left — including Nordstrom in 2015, Sears and Marshalls in 2018 and Macy’s earlier this year — and shopping traffic continued to decline. Plans to pivot to an entertainment district, complete with a bowling alley and concert venue, never materialized.

Entities linked to 245 Park Avenue, a Manhattan skyscraper tied to China’s HNA Group Co., filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, court papers showed, Bloomberg News reported. The listed assets and liabilities are between $1 billion to $10 billion, the filing showed. Tax authorities in Chicago and New York City were listed as the two biggest creditors, where it owes more than $23 million in property taxes. The filing showed the company has enough funds for distribution to unsecured creditors. Three years ago, HNA listed the Manhattan property among the assets that it was putting up for sale as it marketed more than $40 billion of its holdings to cut its debt load. At the time, the building was valued by the company at $2.21 billion.

The city of Boston has set aside $5 million in emergency funds to help local homeowners avoid foreclosure, the Associated Press reported. Eligible residents can apply for assistance under the program, which is open to local residents who are at least 90 days behind on payments and who meet income guidelines. Boston Mayor Kim Janey announced the program Thursday, saying it was an effort to address pandemic-related job losses and the local residents who are now struggling to make ends meet. The city is working with local non-profit agencies to oversee the fund. Recipients will also be offered foreclosure counseling to help them learn how to avoid the risk of foreclosure in the future. “The pandemic has exacerbated inequities in our city, and highlighted the importance of safe, stable housing,” Janey said in a statement. Boston is using federal pandemic relief funds to pay for the program.

Sales of new homes jumped 14% in September to the fastest pace in six months as strong demand helped offset rising prices, the Associated Press reported. The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that sales of new single-family homes rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 800,000 units last month, well above what economists had been expecting. However, the government revised lower its estimates for sales in the previous two months, with August now showing a 1.4% decline to a rate of 702,000 units. The September sales pace was the strongest since sales reached an annual rate of 873,000 in March. The median price of a new home, the point where half the homes sold for more and half for less, rose to a record $408,800 in September, up 9.5% from a year ago. The average sales prices in September increased to $451,700, up 11.5% from a year ago.

Roughly $10 billion of a $46 billion pool of federal rental aid has made it to renters, landlords and utility companies after another $2.8 billion was disbursed by state and local governments in September, the Treasury Department announced yesterday, The Hill reported. Treasury said that funds from the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program reached more than 510,000 households last month and more than 2 million since the initiative began this year. The department had distributed the entirety of the $46 billion to eligible state and local entities in May to help struggling renters avoid eviction upon the expiration of federal and state moratoria. The urgency to expedite the rental aid distribution process ramped up in August when the Supreme Court struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium, which was imposed in September 2020. But despite months of pressure from Treasury and attempts to loosen red tape, nearly 75 percent of the rental assistance funds have yet to reach the intended recipients. Even so, the mass wave of evictions that many policymakers feared has not materialized thanks in part to state and local eviction bans, court backlogs and eviction diversion strategies, according to data from Princeton University's Eviction Lab.

Just a few months after filing for chapter 11, mall operator Washington Prime Group has emerged from bankruptcy, The Real Deal reported. When the real estate investment trust, which owns more than 100 malls across the country, filed for bankruptcy protection in June, it listed $4 billion in assets and $3.5 billion in debts. Through the process, the company has reduced its debt by nearly $1 billion. The company also announced that Lou Conforti is stepping down as chief executive officer. Mark Yale, the executive vice president and chief financial officer, and Josh Lindimore, the executive vice president and head of leasing, will serve as interim co-CEOs.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in cooperation with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), took action today to put an end to alleged redlining by Trustmark National Bank, according to a CFPB press release. The CFPB and DOJ allege that Trustmark discriminated against Black and Hispanic neighborhoods by deliberately not marketing, offering, or originating home loans to consumers in majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Memphis metropolitan area. The CFPB and DOJ also allege that Trustmark discouraged consumers residing in or seeking credit for properties located in these neighborhoods from applying for credit. If entered by the court, the settlement would require Trustmark to put $3.85 million into a loan subsidy program for impacted neighborhoods, increase its lending presence there, and implement proper fair lending procedures. The order would also impose a $5 million civil money penalty against the bank, and will credit the $4 million penalty collected by the OCC toward the satisfaction of this amount.