Sale of failed Liverpool resi falters

Sourced Developments’ proposed 310-apartment Scholars Court stalled in 2024 and progress on finding a buyer has been slow.

Cowgills was appointed to run the administration and recoup cash for creditors when Sourced Developments’ Kingsway Square vehicle ran into difficulty.

The SPV went bust without laying a brick having agreed to sell flats at Scholars Court off-plan to hundreds of investors from the Far East and UAE.

Cowgills estimates the total owed to off-plan property investors, for whom Jark Security Trustee acted as trustee, to be £7.7m. To date, claims totalling £5.68m from 132 buyers have been made.

The most recent administrators report estimates that the company owed a total of £13.2m to creditors at the time of its collapse.

The most obvious method of generating funds to reimburse creditors would be to sell the land between Blackstock Street and Paul Street in the city’s Pumpfields district that the scheme was meant to be built on, valued at £3.1m.

A £4m credit bid from Liverpool-based developer Integritas Property Group was put to the administrators but ultimately did not proceed.

This was due in part to uncertainty around the level of lender Invicta’s £5.5m claim against the collapsed SPV. Integritas’ proposal was that the property would be transferred to the developer “following the assignment of Invicta’s debt to it”, Cowgills’ report states.

The outlook for creditors is further clouded by the threat of a claim from one of the site’s previous owners who sold shares to a firm ultimately acquired by the Sourced SPV at an “undervalue”, according to Cowgills’s report.

Elsewhere, Sourced’s Regent Plaza development in Salford has also stalled. JLL has been appointed by Leonard Curtis, administrators for Regent Plaza Holdings, to find a buyer for the site on the corner of Regent Road and Oldfield Road in Salford, which has permission for 525 flats.