JCPenney Gets Left at the Altar as $947M Exit Plan Collapses… 119 Stores Left Holding the Bag

Pain.

Remember when JCPenney was a hot brand where your mom used to buy you socks and underwear for Christmas. Yeah… about that. JCPenney just made a YUGE oopsie yet again… this time to the tune of a $947 million real estate deal that evaporated right before the finish line. Not delayed. Not “renegotiated.” Straight up poof.

Back in July, JCPenney agreed to sell 119 store properties in an all-cash deal to Onyx Partners Ltd., working through the wonderfully dystopian-sounding Copper Property CTL Pass-Through Trust… aka the entity created during JCPenney’s 2020 bankruptcy whose sole purpose is to sell off whatever real estate isn’t nailed down before the clock runs out.

The price tag is where it really starts to sting. Just under $1 billion, or about $8 million per store. Ten years ago, JCPenney carried a market cap north of $10 billion. Add in the fact that Copper Property managed to sell similar locations for way more before, and it just shows how desperate this process has truly become.

Earlier this month, Copper Property filed an 8-K that basically said, wire the money by December 26 or this deal is going to the great mall in the sky, and as it turns out the money never arrived, the deadline came and went, and everyone involved politely stared at their shoes while the deal expired.

And now? Nobody’s really saying what happens next.

(Source: New York Post)

Officially, all 119 stores are still open, lights on, doors unlocked, mannequins staring into the void as usual. But the trust has a hard liquidation deadline of January 30, 2026, which means the pressure is very real. This thing didn’t fall apart because everyone suddenly got patient.

If you’re keeping score at home, this whole saga traces back to JCPenney’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020, when the company admitted out loud what everyone already knew: COVID hurt, sure… but profitability had already left the building years before the pandemic decided to finish the job.

In the end, JCPenney was absorbed for $1.75 billion by Simon Property Group and Brookfield Asset Management, while Copper Property was left holding about 160 locations and six warehouses with one job and zero margin for error: sell them, quickly.

The problem? Selling malls in 2025 is a bit like trying to flip a Blockbuster franchise with “great foot traffic potential.” Between e-commerce, rising operating costs, and consumers who now buy socks exclusively at midnight on their phones, retail real estate is…how do I say… a tough hang.

Now to be fair, JCPenney the retailer has shown some signs of life. The company recently posted a profitable quarter, and earlier this year merged with SPARC Group to form Catalyst Brands, a mashup of legacy names like Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer, and Lucky Brand.

That said, Catalyst insists the failed deal doesn’t change anything operationally. The stores stay open. The doors stay unlocked. The cash registers… theoretically continue to ring.

But honestly, that’s not the part anyone should be fixated on. Whether JCPenney squeaks through another quarter is almost beside the point. The real story is that nearly $1 billion of supposedly “guaranteed” cash managed to disappear right when the clock got loudest. 

Did the buyer flinch? Did lenders suddenly tighten up? Did someone finally sit down, run the numbers, and quietly decide this wasn’t worth it? Your guess is as good as anyone’s… because no one involved seems eager to explain.

What is clear is that a near-billion-dollar deal fell apart, 119 stores are now stuck in limbo, and the trust responsible for cleaning up this entire situation is burning through what little runway it has left. And that’s the kind of setup that usually ends one way. Pain.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Simon Property Group as mentioned in the article.