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Washington Prime Group Inc.’s creditors are having difficulty advancing discussions over a planned chapter 11 filing as groups tussle over dividing the mall owner’s assets, Bloomberg News reported. The slow talks have sparked several deadline extensions -- the latest announced on Wednesday -- with sticking points, including creditors’ rights to assets that aren’t already being used as collateral for Washington Prime’s debt. The company on Monday reported a $55 million loss for the three months through March 31. At issue is the division of new equity, debt and cash each lender group would receive from the bankruptcy plan. Given the diminishing appeal of owning a mall chain, the parties are all pushing to minimize their equity exposure and maximize their take of new debt, they added. After the latest extension, Washington Prime’s forbearance agreements with lenders are set to expire May 19.

The Archdiocese of Santa Fe, N.M., intends to hire a land use planning consultant to help it shed dozens of properties as part of its bankruptcy case, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported. Consultants with James W. Siebert & Associates, a Santa Fe land planning firm, would be among numerous experts the archdiocese has hired — attorneys, real estate brokers and accountants — drawing accusations from critics of wasteful spending that ultimately will affect payouts to hundreds of victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy. An attorney with the Roman Catholic institution said, however, the experts are needed and that bankruptcy court is the most efficient place for settlements between victims and dioceses. Court records show the archdiocese has asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David T. Thuma for approval to hire the Siebert firm. The records say that Siebert can help the archdiocese comply with subdivision statutes and regulations. A court document said the Siebert company would charge $180 an hour if a principal of the firm worked on the case, $120 an hour if an associate worked on it, $95 an hour for a computer-aided designer and $45 an hour each for research and clerical work. An attorney for the archdiocese, Ford Elsaesser, said that real estate issues can involve broken lot lines or lots created long ago. Elsaesser, who is based in Idaho, said he didn’t want to contract properties for sale and then learn a step was missed in the process. “So that’s the reason why they’re being engaged,” Elsaesser said of Siebert. An auctioneer hired by the archdiocese recently began trying to sell 732 properties around Northern New Mexico.

A sprawling shopping mall in Syracuse, New York, may be driven into one of the biggest municipal-bond defaults since the onset of the pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. Already struggling before the lockdowns hammered retailers, Destiny USA, the state’s largest mall, said it doesn’t know if it will generate enough cash to keep running and pay its debts this year, raising doubts about whether it can continue as a business. Its owner, Pyramid Management Group, hired restructuring advisers and has sought a meeting with investors who hold about $285 million of municipal bonds that financed the project, according to a filing last month. Nuveen LLC and MFS Investment Management were the biggest holders of the debt as of March 31, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. If Destiny can’t pay what it owes, it would be the second-largest default in the state and local government bond market since Covid-19 began racing through the nation in early 2020. It would also mark the first ever on debt backed by payments developers agreed to make instead of property taxes, making it a potential precedent for a $7.5 billion corner of the market that financed New York’s Hudson Yards development, the Mets’ baseball stadium and the new American Dream mall in New Jersey, whose grand opening was delayed by the pandemic.

Companies are not massively defaulting on their office leases, and that’s the good thing. But they have put a historic amount of vacant office space on the sublease market, while continuing to pay rent to the landlord, according to a commentary on WolfStreet.com. They decided they no longer need that much space, now that some form of flexible work, or hybrid work-from-home, or even permanent work-from-anywhere is being integrated into office real estate plans, cost cutting efforts, and footprint-reduction strategies. Now, 14 months into the pandemic, office occupancy — workers actually showing up at the office — is still dreadfully low. As of the end of April, office occupancy in the 10 largest metros averaged only 26.5% of where it had been just before the pandemic, according to Kastle Systems today, whose electronic access systems secure thousands of office buildings around the country. In other words, the number of people entering these offices was still down by 73.5% from pre-pandemic levels and has barely made headway in recent months. The epicenters of work-from-home show the biggest drops in office occupancy rates, according to Kastle’s “Back to Work Barometer” at the end of April: in San Francisco, the occupancy rate was at 14.8% of the pre-pandemic level, in New York City at 16.2%, and in San Jose at 18.0%.

A federal judge yesterday threw out the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's nationwide moratorium on evictions, a setback for the millions of Americans who have fallen behind on rent payments during the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said that while there was "no doubt" Congress intended to empower the CDC to combat COVID-19 through a range of measures such as quarantines, a moratorium on residential evictions was not among them. Friedrich cited the "plain language" of a law called the Public Health Service Act, which governs the federal response to the spread of communicable diseases, even while acknowledging that the pandemic is "a serious public health crisis that has presented unprecedented challenges for public health officials and the nation." The U.S. Justice Department said it is appealing, and will seek an emergency order to put the judge's decision on hold. Evictions "exacerbate the spread of COVID-19," and the moratorium "protects many renters who cannot make their monthly payments due to job loss or healthcare expenses," Brian Boynton, acting assistant attorney general for the department's civil division, said in a statement. The White House has estimated that one in five renters were delinquent on payments by January, while the CDC has said more than 4 million adults who were behind feared imminent eviction. Judge Friedrich's decision benefits the many landlords struggling to pay their own bills because they are unable to collect rent from tenants. The CDC moratorium began last September and was scheduled to lapse on June 30. Other courts have been divided over its legality, with some also finding the CDC exceeded its authority. Friedrich, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, was the first to formally block the eviction ban. At least 43 states and Washington, D.C., have also temporarily halted residential or business evictions, though the protections are far from uniform.

Brookfield Property Partners agreed to throw in the towel on three struggling malls owned by the real-estate giant, with the possibility of more to come, as it goes private in an $6.5 billion deal, according to a new report, MarketWatch.com reported. The real-estate owner recently agreed to a “friendly foreclosure,” or when a borrower willingly hands back a property to creditors, on the Florence Mall in Kentucky, the Bayshore Call in Eureka, Calif. and the Pierre Bossier Mall in Bossier City, La., with a combined $174.6 million of senior mortgage debt, according KCP Research. The KCP team also pointed to negotiations between Brookfield Property BPY, and lenders on seven other embattled malls, saddled with $797.8 million of combined senior debt, about potentially friendly foreclosures. If that happens, Brookfield would be walking away from almost $1 billion of mall debt borrowed over the years in the commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) market, a popular form of finance where Wall Street banks bundle loans on commercial properties into bonds, which are then sold to investors, often money managers, pension funds and the like. Even before the pandemic, some big-name investors were betting against debt on downtrodden malls, with the view to profit as cash flows at properties fell, borrowers defaulted and prices on mall-related securities plunged.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Acting Director Dave Uejio and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Acting Chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter sent notification letters yesterday to the nation’s largest apartment landlords, which collectively own more than 2 million units. The letters remind these landlords of federal protections in place to keep tenants in their homes and stop the spread of COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has extended until June 30 a temporary moratorium on evictions for non-payment of rent, and the CFPB has issued an interim final rule, which takes effect today, establishing new notice requirements under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). The notification letters are the latest public action by the CFPB and the FTC in support of the CDC moratorium. The CDC order generally prohibits landlords from evicting tenants for non-payment of rent, if the tenant submits a written declaration that she is unable to afford full rental payments and would likely become homeless or have to move into a shared living setting if evicted. This prohibition applies to an agent or attorney acting on behalf of a landlord or owner of the residential property.

Black homeowners are having a harder time catching up on missed mortgage payments than other borrowers, new federal research shows, the Wall Street Journal reported. The share of Black homeowners in forbearance stood at about 11% in mid-April, more than double the overall rate and that of white borrowers, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The rate for Hispanic homeowners hovered around 8.4%. The mortgage forbearance program laid out in the March 2020 stimulus bill was designed as a short-term solution, a way for homeowners to postpone payments on federally backed mortgages until the economy and consumers recovered. That is how the program has functioned for many. The share of homeowners in forbearance has decreased for eight straight weeks, to 4.49% as of mid-April, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Almost one in 10 homeowners signed up for forbearance at the height of the program’s use last June. But the overall improvement masks a slower recovery for Black borrowers. Between June 2020 and mid-April 2021, the share of Black homeowners in forbearance fell 35%, compared with a 43% drop overall, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Asian, white and Hispanic borrowers saw improvement rates of between 45% and 53%.