Inspired Healthcare Lenders Fight Bid to Charge Them for Sale Costs
Three secured lenders are fighting bankrupt senior-living sponsor Inspired Healthcare Capital’s bid to recover the costs of selling their collateral – investment bank Raymond James’ advisory fees, insurance, post-petition property taxes, and operating-shortfall funding the debtors call “Community Support” – now that the company’s roughly $713.5 million asset sale has closed. The debtors’ motion targets four lenders in all: Stride Bank, Pinnacle Bank, HPI Fairmount Lender, and HPI Delray Lender. Under the sale settlements reached for those four communities, each lender’s proceeds included a “Holdback” explicitly left open to this kind of dispute, and the lenders have now filed three objections, with the two HPI entities filing jointly, that for the first time put dollar figures on what they’re contesting.
HPI Fairmount Lender and HPI Delray Lender, which hold liens on the Grapevine, Texas, and Delray Beach, Fla., communities, are contesting $2,064,311 of the surcharge sought against Delray Beach outright and have reserved a separate objection to $1,120,920 sought against Grapevine, arguing that property’s $18,125,000 in sale proceeds already exceed HPI Fairmount’s payoff, leaving no basis for any surcharge there. Pinnacle Bank is contesting the full $1,321,250 sought against its collateral in Melbourne, Fla., where it says the single qualifying bid for the property came in “more than $5 million less than the debt owed to Pinnacle.” Stride Bank, owed $12,609,560.53 on its Fort Myers, Fla., loan as of Oct. 1, is contesting $900,728 of the $1,493,277 the debtors are seeking against that property. Stride isn’t fighting the Raymond James fee, property insurance, or tax portions of the request, as long as those are paid from excess proceeds first.
All three objections make a version of the same legal argument: that under Bankruptcy Code Section 506(c), a debtor can charge a secured creditor’s collateral only for costs that are necessary, reasonable, and provide a direct, quantifiable benefit to that specific creditor, and that overhead allocated by revenue share, untracked operating expenses, and portfolio-wide insurance premiums don’t meet that bar for any one property’s lender.
It isn’t the first time this group has gone to court over the sale’s dollars. AltsWire reported in August that these same lenders – along with UMB Bank and Provident Bank, whose disputes have since settled – objected that the auction opened without any accounting for how proceeds would split between the real estate-owning entities and the operating companies. That fight was over proceeds allocation; this one is over costs.
HPI’s objection, the most detailed of the three, also puts a sharper number on how much value the case’s sale process has shed. The Delray Beach community sold for $25.1 million; the Delaware statutory trust that bought it paid $52.25 million for the property in 2023, and the debtors’ own 2026 schedules and a February 2026 appraisal both valued it at roughly $39.9 million, meaning the sale price is less than half of what investors paid three years ago, before any surcharge is even subtracted. HPI’s filing says that price also came down from an originally represented $26.1 million allocation without notice to HPI, and cites testimony from Raymond James that the marketing and auction process for the portfolio ran 217 days against an originally scheduled 141.
The surcharge fight follows the resolution of a separate dispute over the same two HPI-linked properties. HPI’s objections to the underlying Grapevine and Delray Beach sale orders – filed before, during, and after the auction – were settled under a stipulation the bankruptcy court approved on Nov. 9. The terms were filed under seal, so what HPI and the debtors actually agreed to for those two sales isn’t public; the surcharge fight is a separate, still fully contested dispute over sale-related costs, not a reopening of that settlement.
The hearing calendar for the surcharge dispute is not entirely clear from the public record. A scheduling order covering Pinnacle’s piece of the motion sets an evidentiary hearing for Nov. 17, with discovery, depositions, and expert disclosures due in the weeks before. HPI’s own objection, however, describes the hearing on its piece — covering the Delray Beach and Grapevine proceeds — as set for Dec. 3, the same date the court is separately due to take up former chief executive officer Luke Lee’s motion to use the company’s directors-and-officers insurance to pay his legal defense costs, a matter AltsWire reported on in August. Neither filing accounts for Stride’s piece of the dispute. It isn’t clear from what’s public whether the motion has been split across two hearing dates by lender, or whether one of the filings is simply out of date.
The surcharge fight isn’t the only thing on the court’s Nov. 17 calendar. The debtors are also seeking approval that day for a third increase to their debtor-in-possession financing – an additional $52.8 million that would bring the total facility to $100 million – and the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors has its own bid for documents from the debtors’ tax and auditing professionals set to be heard that day after three earlier postponements.
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