🏡New Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filing - BRD Land & Investment🏡

Entitlement and permitting company files chapter 11 in North Carolina to sort out debts.

On February 24, 2026, Charlotte-based BRD Land & Investment (“BRD”) and two affiliates (collectively, together with BRD, the “debtors”) filed chapter 11 bankruptcy cases in the Western District of North Carolina (Judge Beyer). Or was it BRDL Land & Investment? We had to doublecheck since that’s the caption CRO and first day declarant William “Andy” Barbee went with:

Source: Docket 12

Source: GIPHY. AI wouldn’t have f*cked that up.

Anyway, BRD is “… an entitlement and permitting company focusing on selling shovel-ready land to national and regional homebuilders,” while the other two debtors BRDL Warden Station, LLC and BRDL Warden Station Holding Co LLC, own real estate in Horry County, SC for the aptly named Warden Station project and serve as a holdco for said project. Hopefully (🙏) you don’t need us to tell you which is which.

The debtors entered chapter 11 for several reasons, one of them being prepetition lender DLP Lending Fund, LLC (“DLP”), which historically (i) lent cash to purchase real estate secured by mortgages in the applicable property and (ii) worked cooperatively with the debtors. The track record here isn’t bad either — since ‘19, the debtors’ consolidated “… top line revenues …” have cleared $285mm.

‘25 changed all that. On account of a “… drastic decline in (and in some cases the disappearance of) first-time home purchases to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis,” …

Source: Tenor

… DLP decided it was time to exit the relationship. It pivoted to using “… a pressure campaign …” to get paid down and, because why not?, extract handsome fees along the way. But how bad was the decline? Mr. Barbee has the scoop:

“These market realities caused home builders to cancel or to renegotiate their land sale agreements with the Debtors. The Debtors saw thirteen (13) projects terminate in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, while having seven (7) projects in Texas become nonviable due to market contraction. These terminations resulted in a reduction of total projected pipeline gross revenue of $390 million in 2025…

For example, one of the Debtors’ projects, Rolling Meadows, was set to close for $47,265,000 but the purchaser demanded a price concession of $11,901,000 to which the Debtors agreed given their inability to find a ready purchaser at the original contract price. DLP held a security interest in Rolling Meadows’ real property and demanded an exit fee of $3.5 million to be paid immediately at closing rather than the October 2026 due date set by the loan documents. But DLP demanded that payment be advanced by a year and paid at closing in October 2025 to release its lien.”

Because BRD needed the deal to close, it acquiesced, and then it got to work getting rid of DLP.

To effectuate its paydown, BRD leveraged its existing relationships, and those investors pumped capital into the debtors via promissory notes. A lot of ‘em — “… more than one hundred …” as of the petition date, which aggregate to ~$66.5mm. But DLP ain’t gone — it’s still owed ~$20mm secured by ~$34mm of real estate.

What is gone is any decent relationship with vendors. True to form, the debtors also used them to finance DLP’s paydown. By the end of January ‘26, the balance owed to those stretched folks exceeded $9mm, and they refused to do any more work without getting paid.* We won’t blame them; Johnny sure as sh*t likes getting paid for his work too. Nevertheless, it put BRD into a predictable, foreseeable death spiral — “… the Debtors needed cash to pay the vendors, but the Debtors could not generate that cash without selling their projects, for which they needed the vendors to complete their work.”