Administrators of the collapsed Sydney developer Bathla Group stood down 213 of its roughly 350 staff at an all-staff meeting on Monday morning, after five of the company's 43 lenders agreed to fund two more weeks of building on the sites they hold security over. Construction on every other Bathla project has stopped.

Teneo, appointed as administrator on 25 August, had until Monday morning to find the money after a creditors' meeting on Friday was told the company had about $200,000 in cash. The five lenders who came forward will keep sites tied to their own loans moving for a fortnight. The other 38 have not put money in, and the projects they are exposed to are suspended.

The people who lose first are the workers. The 213 staff stood down are owed wages and superannuation as part of the $4 million the company owes its employees, and the ABC reported on Monday that many of them are on working visas. Behind them are the buyers who have contracts on apartments and houses on suspended sites, and the subcontractors and suppliers who make up most of the $130 million owed to unsecured creditors.

Figures presented to creditors put Bathla's total debt at $3.4 billion. Secured lenders are owed $3.08 billion. The Tax Office is owed $145 million and the NSW government is owed $42 million in land tax. The company had 219 sites when the administrators arrived, 45 of them under construction, with about 2,500 homes being built and land for 14,000 more, according to figures reported by The Urban Developer from Friday's meeting.

“Our immediate priority has been to secure sufficient short-term funding to maintain a minimum viable operating structure," Teneo's Stephen Longley said in a statement on Monday. "The arrangements agreed allow us to provide the central support required for construction to continue on projects associated with the lenders participating in the funding package." The administrators did not name the lenders or say how much they had committed. The ABC reported the package at between $3 million and $5 million against running costs of $1 million to $1.3 million a week, and named La Trobe, PAG, Centuria Bass and Ray White Capital as four of the five.”

Longley was direct about the gap that remains. "Significant work remains to secure the funding required to progress and ultimately complete all projects currently under construction," he said.

Bathla, founded in NSW in 1997 and also trading as Universal Property Group, went into administration on 25 August. Chief executive Robert Loader said at the time that the business had been through "a period of declining sales and falling property prices, while construction costs have increased." Alceon, one of its larger lenders, had already exited a $670 million exposure in January.

The NSW government has declined to put in the $20 million the administrators said they needed to keep the whole business running. "It is not my money, it is the taxpayers' of New South Wales, and I can't commit it lightly," Premier Chris Minns said on 29 August. On Monday he pointed to a break-up as the likely path. "There is still prospect for either the breaking up of the company and other parties stepping in to grab a piece of it and complete the works," he said.

The two weeks of funding runs to about 21 September. By then the administrators need either a buyer for the business or its parts, or a funding agreement covering the sites that the remaining lenders have so far left idle. No date has been set for the second creditors' meeting.