Real Estate, Consumer Discretionary Sectors Account for 53% of 2021’s Chapter 11s Year-to-Date

August is coming to a close with a mix of real estate, healthcare and consumer services companies filing chapter 11s this week. Included in these filings were Tix Corp, a Las Vegas show tickets company; “point of purchase” business Brown Industries; and various real estate filers, including the owner of real property underlying the New England Sports Village, a planned athletic, entertainment and hospitality complex in Attleboro, Mass. There was also another continuing care retirement community, Regional Housing & Community Services Corp (the fifth to file so far this year, along with three skilled nursing facility operators), as well as another healthcare filing from wound care supply company Advanced Tissue.

Consumer discretionary and real estate remain the only two sectors with at least 20 filings so far in 2021, with real estate accounting for just under 30% of filings and consumer discretionary accounting for 24%. For the year-to-date period, the breakdown of chapter 11 filings by sector is shown below:

The graph below shows the aggregate count of chapter 11 filings by the end of each month from January 2020 to Aug. 27, 2021, broken down by the five busiest sectors over the period. While the energy and consumer discretionary sectors transitioned from a steep increase in filing frequency between April and August of last year before tapering off in the fall and further softening this year, the real estate sector has remained relatively stable since its increase in filing frequency that began toward the end of last year.

Tix Corporation filed its case on Tuesday in Nevada, after the Covid-19 pandemic brought its Las Vegas show tickets and tours company to a halt for 15 months. Tix reopened some operations in advance of the filing, but said that the delta variant has caused a drop in demand for entertainment in “recent weeks.” Despite a cash infusion from the company’s CEO and “significant stockholder” in February, the debtors still “require additional funding to continue as a going concern,” and therefore seek to run a chapter 11 sale process. The company also says, through a press release, that it “seeks and intends to obtain Debtor-in-Possession (DIP) financing from any lenders that will serve to supplement the Company’s current cash position, enabling it to operate the business uninterrupted and continue to meet its financial obligations, including the timely payment of employee wages and benefits, lease payments, and other obligations, as well as administering its Chapter 11 cases."

Brown Industries, a Dalton-Ga.-based global “point of purchase” business serving the apparel, convenience store, flooring, grocery, home improvement, retail and manufacturing markets with print, sampling, display and logistics services industries, filed on Friday, Aug. 20 in the Northern District of Georgia, but held its first day hearing this week. The company has been harmed by cash flow issues in recent years, surviving on loans and advances from the Brown family and other shareholders. The Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the debtor’s cash flow issues, which “forced the Debtor to make the difficult decision to lay off a number of its employees and mothball its printing business.”

Below is a recap of the sale-related events for the week’s cases:

 

Case data, such as advisors and DIP financing terms, including for filings discussed above, can be found in the First Day Database, which includes all U.S. chapter 11 cases filed since 2012 with over $10 million in liabilities.