BuzzFeed on the Predatory Lending Practices of Warren Buffett owned mortgage lender

Buffett owned company builds mobile homes. Buffett owned company sells mobile homes to people of color, steering them to Buffett owned mortgage lender, which charges them hight rates.

Between the cost of the home, and the loan rates, people of color default, get evicted, and Buffett owned company starts all over again, selling same home to another person of color who can't afford it:

After a few years living with her sister, Rose Mary Zunie, 59, was ready to move into a place of her own.

So, on an arid Saturday morning this past summer, the sisters piled into a friend’s pickup truck and headed for a Clayton Homes sales lot here just outside the impoverished Navajo reservation.

The women — one in a long, colorful tribal skirt, another wearing turquoise jewelry, a traditional talisman against evil — were steered to a mobile home sales agent who spoke Navajo, just like the voice on the store’s radio ads.

He walked them through Clayton-built homes on the lot, then into the sales center, passing a banner and posters promoting one subprime lender: Vanderbilt Mortgage, a Clayton subsidiary. Inside, he handed them a Vanderbilt sales pamphlet.

“Vanderbilt is the only one that finances on the reservation,” he told the women.

His claim, which the women caught on tape, was a lie. And it was illegal.

It is just one in a pattern of deceptions that Clayton has used to help extract billions from poor customers around the country — particularly people of color, who make up a substantial and growing portion of its business.

The company is controlled by Warren Buffett, one of world’s richest men, but its methods hardly match Buffett’s honest, folksy image: Clayton systematically pursues unwitting minority home buyers and baits them into costly subprime loans, many of which are doomed to fail, an investigation by BuzzFeed News and the Seattle Times has found.

Clayton’s predatory practices have damaged minority communities — from rural black enclaves in the Louisiana Delta, across Spanish-speaking swaths of Texas, to Native American reservations in the Southwest. Many customers end up losing their homes, thousands of dollars in down payments, or even land they’d owned outright.

Over the 12 years since Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Clayton Homes, the company has grown to dominate virtually every aspect of America’s mobile-home industry. It builds nearly half the new manufactured homes sold in this country every year, making it the most prolific U.S. home builder of any type. It sells them through a network of more than 1,600 dealerships. And it finances more mobile-home loans than any other lender by a factor of more than seven.

In minority communities, Clayton’s grip on the lending market verges on monopolistic: Last year, according to federal data, Clayton made 72% of the loans to black people who financed mobile homes.

The company’s in-house lender, Vanderbilt Mortgage, charges minority borrowers substantially higher rates, on average, than their white counterparts. In fact, federal data shows that Vanderbilt typically charges black people who make over $75,000 a year slightly more than white people who make only $35,000.

Warren Buffett's Predatory Lender Charges Minorities A Lot More

 

Web-Print collaboration ... interesting.

Are BuzzFeed and Seattle Times at all joined financially?

 

Well, I think we can hazard a guess which newspaper Warren Buffet would like to buy next.

 

Warren "Old Country" Buffet, YF?

Here is the response from the company:

Press Releases

 

Never bought a mobile home. But I can testify that his home warranty company, which rhymes with American Home Shield, is crooked as a $3 bill.

 

Buffett-owned. Christ.

 

So how many of these same minority borrowers got into financial trouble by going to a Sheldon Adelson-owned casino and blowing their paycheck?

 

This is also the classic used-car sales scam/tactic when selling to unqualified buyers. Charge them high rates, repossess and start all over.

 

Quite a bit of discussion about Clayton in Warren Buffett's annual letter.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2015ltr.pdf