Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog
,
The disastrous deal ruined their finances and nearly their
marriage. But until informed recently by a reporter, they didn’t
realize that the homebuilder (Golden West), the dealer (Oakwood
Homes) and the lender (21st Mortgage) were all part of a single
company: Clayton Homes, the nation’s biggest homebuilder, which is
controlled by its second-richest man — Warren Buffett.
Buffett’s mobile-home empire promises low-income Americans the
dream of homeownership. But Clayton relies on predatory sales
practices, exorbitant fees, and interest rates that can exceed 15
percent, trapping many buyers in loans they can’t afford and in
homes that are almost impossible to sell or refinance, an
investigation by The Seattle Times and
Center
for Public Integrity has found.
Berkshire Hathaway, the investment conglomerate Buffett leads,
bought Clayton in 2003 and spent billions building it into the
mobile-home industry’s biggest manufacturer and lender. Today,
Clayton is a many-headed hydra with companies operating under at
least 18 names, constructing nearly half of the industry’s new
homes and selling them through its own retailers. It finances more
mobile-home purchases than any other lender by a factor of six. It
also sells property insurance on them and repossesses them when
borrowers fail to pay.
Former dealers said the company encouraged them to steer buyers
to finance with Clayton’s own high-interest lenders.
Buyers told of Clayton collection agents urging them to cut
back on food and medical care or seek handouts in order to make
house payments.
To maintain its down-to-earth image, Clayton has hired the
stars of the reality-TV show “Duck Dynasty” to appear in ads…
- From the excellent Seattle Times article:
The Mobile-Home Trap: How a Warren Buffett Empire
Preys on the Poor
In so many ways, Warren Buffett and modern America are the same
thing.
An idea packaged and marketed so brilliantly, most of
humanity unquestionably believes the myth.Warren Buffett
and the U.S. both sell themselves as encompassing the very
best of human qualities; highly successful, extraordinarily
intelligent, yet at the same time, extremely ethical. It’s that
last part that’s actually most important to the continued power and
prestige of both the man and the nation-state. However, when you
look beneath the surface, it becomes increasingly clear that
neither of them actually come close to what’s printed on
the package.
Incredibly, Mr. Buffett has proven far more successful in
maintaining and nurturing his own personal myth, than America
itself has during these post crisis years. While more and more
people domestically, and especially internationally, have come
to acknowledge the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign and economic
policy, it continues to be something marginally short of cultural
blasphemy to harshly criticize Warren Buffett. This provides
a fertile environment for him to continue to doggedly and
ruthlessly expand his ubiquitous economic and political
empire.
This is not an empire built simply on cheeseburgers, cherry coke
and ice cream cones. As you will see in the following article, his
empire is also dependent on predatory lending to the poor,
kickbacks, market domination, lobbying and opacity, via Berkshire
Hathaway’s mobile home company, Clayton Homes.
Clayton Homes was previously mentioned here at Liberty
Blitzkrieg a year ago in the post,
With 1 in 3 Homes Unaffordable, Freddie Mac
Prepares to Enter the Trailer Home Loan Market
, but an excellent deep-dive article recently published by
the
Seattle Timesprovides a great deal of additional and
extremely disturbing information.
Here are some excerpts, but I strongly suggest reading the
entire article:
Billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett controls a
mobile-home empire that promises low-income borrowers affordable
houses. But all too often, it traps those owners in high-interest
loans and rapidly depreciating homes.
EPHRATA, Grant County — After years of living in a 1963 travel
trailer, Kirk and Patricia Ackley found a permanent house with
enough space to host grandkids and care for her aging father
suffering from dementia.
So, as the pilot cars prepared to guide the factory-built home
up from Oregon in May 2006, the Ackleys were elated to finalize
paperwork waiting for them at their loan broker’s kitchen
table.
But the closing documents he set before them held a surprise:
The promised 7 percent interest rate was now 12.5 percent,
with monthly payments of $1,100, up from $700.
The terms were too extreme for the Ackleys. But they’d already
spent $11,000, at the dealer’s urging, for a concrete foundation to
accommodate this specific home.
Kirk’s construction job and Patricia’s Wal-Mart job together
weren’t enough to afford the new monthly payment.
But, they said, the broker was willing to inflate their
income in order to qualify them for the loan.
The disastrous deal ruined their finances and nearly their
marriage. But until informed recently by a reporter, they didn’t
realize that the homebuilder (Golden West), the dealer (Oakwood
Homes) and the lender (21st Mortgage) were all part of a single
company: Clayton Homes, the nation’s biggest homebuilder, which is
controlled by its second-richest man — Warren Buffett.
Buffett’s mobile-home empire promises low-income Americans the
dream of homeownership. But Clayton relies on predatory sales
practices, exorbitant fees, and interest rates that can exceed 15
percent, trapping many buyers in loans they can’t afford and in
homes that are almost impossible to sell or refinance, an
investigation by The Seattle Times and
Center
for Public Integrity has found.
Berkshire Hathaway, the investment conglomerate Buffett leads,
bought Clayton in 2003 and spent billions building it into the
mobile-home industry’s biggest manufacturer and lender. Today,
Clayton is a many-headed hydra with companies operating under at
least 18 names, constructing nearly half of the industry’s new
homes and selling them through its own retailers. It finances more
mobile-home purchases than any other lender by a factor of six. It
also sells property insurance on them and repossesses them when
borrowers fail to pay.
Berkshire extracts value at every stage of the process. Clayton
even builds the homes with materials — such as paint and carpeting
— supplied by other Berkshire subsidiaries.
Former dealers said the company encouraged them to steer buyers
to finance with Clayton’s own high-interest lenders.
Buyers told of Clayton collection agents urging them to cut
back on food and medical care or seek handouts in order to make
house payments. And when homes got hauled off to be resold, some
consumers already had paid so much in fees and interest that the
company still came out ahead. Even through the Great Recession and
housing crisis,
Clayton was profitable every year, generating $558 million
in pre-tax earnings in 2014.
The company’s tactics contrast with Buffett’s public profile as
a financial sage who values responsible lending and helping poor
Americans keep their homes.
This is the key to Buffett’s continued success. A public profile
that is basically a myth compared with reality.
Berkshire Hathaway spokeswoman Carrie Sova and Clayton
spokeswoman Audrey Saunders ignored more than a dozen requests by
phone, email and in person to discuss Clayton’s policies and
treatment of consumers.In an emailed statement, Saunders
said Clayton helps customers find homes within their budgets and
has a “purpose of opening doors to a better life, one home at a
time.”
In 2013, Clayton provided 39 percent of new mobile-home loans,
according to a Times/CPI analysis of federal data that 7,000 home
lenders are required to submit.
The next biggest lender was Wells Fargo, with just 6
percent of the loans.
Of course, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is the
largest shareholder in Wells Fargo.
Clayton provided more than half of new mobile-home loans in
eight states. In Texas, the number exceeds 70 percent. Clayton has
more than 90 percent of the market in Odessa, one of the most
expensive places in the country to finance a mobile home.
To maintain its down-to-earth image, Clayton has hired the
stars of the reality-TV show “Duck Dynasty” to appear in ads.
It’s all just a show, yet Americans remain completely awestruck
by this clever oligarch.
“Home purchases should involve an honest-to-God down payment of
at least 10% and monthly payments that can be comfortably handled
by the borrower’s income,” Buffett later wrote. “That income should
be carefully verified.”
But in examining more than 100 Clayton home sales through
interviews and reviews of loan documents from 41 states, reporters
found that the company’s loans routinely violated the lending
standards laid out by Buffett.
Clayton dealers often sold homes with no cash down
payment.Numerous borrowers said they were persuaded to
take on outsized payments by dealers promising that they could
later refinance. And the average loan term actually increased from
21 years in 2007 to more than 23 years in 2009, the last time
Berkshire disclosed that detail.
Many borrowers interviewed for this investigation described
being steered by Clayton dealers into Clayton financing without
realizing the companies were one and the same. Sometimes, buyers
said, the dealer described the financing as the best deal
available. Other times, the Clayton dealer said it was the only
financing option.
Kevin Carroll, former owner of a Clayton-affiliated dealership
in Indiana, said in an interview that he used business loans from a
Clayton lender to finance inventory for his lot.
If he also guided homebuyers to work with the same lender,
21st Mortgage, the company would give him a discount on his
business loans — a “kickback,” in his words.
During the most recent four-year period, 93 percent of
Clayton’s mobile-home loans had such costly terms that they
required extra disclosure under federal rules. Among all other
mobile-home lenders, fewer than half of their loans met that
threshold.
A couple of years after moving into their new mobile home, Kirk
Ackley was injured in a backhoe rollover. Unable to work, he and
his wife urgently needed to refinance the
costly 21st Mortgage loan they regretted
signing.
They pleaded with the lender several times for the better terms
that they originally were promised, but were denied, they said. The
Ackleys tried to explain the options to a 21st supervisor: If they
refinanced to lower payments, they could stay in the home and 21st
would get years of steady returns. Otherwise, the company would
have to come out to their rural property, pull the house from its
foundation and haul it away, possibly damaging it during the
repossession.
They both recall being baffled by his reply: “We don’t care.
We’ll come take a chainsaw to it — cut it up and haul it out in
boxes.”
Nine Clayton consumers interviewed for this story said they
were promised a chance to refinance. In reality, Clayton almost
never refinances loans and accounts for well under 1 percent of
mobile-home refinancings reported in government data from 2010 to
2013. It made more than one-third of the purchase loans during that
period.
Carroll has since sold belongings, borrowed money from
relatives and cut back on groceries to make payments.
When she was late, she spoke frequently to Clayton’s phone
agents, whom she described as “the rudest, most condescending
people I have ever dealt with.” It’s a characterization echoed by
almost every borrower interviewed for this story.
Consumers say the company’s response to pleas for help is an
invasive interrogation about their family budgets, including how
much they spend on food, toiletries and utilities.
Denise Pitts, of Knoxville, Tenn., said Vanderbilt collectors
have called her multiple times a day, with one suggesting that she
cancel her Internet service, even though she home-schools her son.
They have called her relatives and neighbors, a tactic other
borrowers reported.
After Pitts’ husband, Kirk, was diagnosed with aggressive
cancer, she said, a Vanderbilt agent told her she should make the
house payment her “first priority” and let medical bills go
unpaid.She said the company has threatened to seize her
property immediately, even though the legal process to do so would
take at least several months.
Practices like contacting neighbors, calling repeatedly and
making false threats can violate consumer-protection laws in
Washington, Tennessee and other states.
The government has known for years about concerns that
mobile-home buyers are treated unfairly. Little has been done.
MHI spent $4.5 million since 2003 lobbying the federal
government. Those efforts have helped the company escape much
scrutiny, as has Buffett’s persona as a man of the people, analysts
say.
“There is a Teflon aspect to Warren Buffett,” said James
McRitchie,who runs a widely read blog,
Corporate
Governance.
Personally, I never thought twice about the Warren Buffett myth
until I noticed how much he pandered to the government for Wall
Street bailouts. Bailouts, which clearly in retrospect,
funneled enormous wealth to the super rich, while leaving
everyone else out to dry.
My most popular post on the subject of Mr. Buffett was published
all the way back in 2011, and titled,
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Here’s the
opening paragraph:
Anyone that has read these pieces for a while knows where I
stand on Warren Buffett. Namely I can’t stand him. It
has nothing to do with the fact that he has so much money. I
am not an envious person and moreover I think having wealth
anywhere near his is more of a curse than a blessing. The
reason I can’t stand him is because he is a fraud. While he
may have been a great investor at one point, he is more of a great
actor than anything else. Here is one of the richest people
in the world. He sits there in Nebraska, chuckling, drinking
his cherry coke and eating hamburgers in this pathetically obvious
attempt to convince the masses he is “just like us.” The term
wolf in sheep’s clothing was invented for guys like this.
Like most people out there I don’t like bad guys. The trick;
however, is that the most dangerous bad guys don’t come out and
tell you they are bad guys and how they are going to fleece
you. What they do is pretend they are the good guys.
Pretend that they are on the side of the little guy or working for
the “collective good,” which is a preposterous statement because
there is no such thing. Human desires and notions of what is
a good life are as varied as the stars in the sky. Once we
start allowing officials or rich people to define “collective good”
you can be sure we are finished.
With all of that in mind, take a look at one of the pictures
used in the
Seattle Timesarticle:
The man to the left is Kevin Clayton, CEO of Clayton Homes,
and the man to the right is, of course, “Uncle” Warren Buffett,
clutching his characteristic ice cream pop. Take a close look at
the expression on the face of Kevin Clayton. This isn’t a look of
admiration, respect, or even love. It’s a look of worship, of
undying cultish fervor. The only thing missing is a tongue hanging
out of his mouth and a blob of drool on his tie. If you ever see me
looking at anyone with this sort of expression, immediately put me
out of my misery.
One thing that’s crystal clear, is there’s no doubt regarding
the intelligence of Warren Buffett. We don’t need to discuss it, or
express admiration for that here. On the other hand, many questions
need to be asked about his supposedly ethical business practices.
To me, he seems to represent the consummate personification of
the saying “do as I say, not as I do.” At the end of the day, I
think the secret to his continuing success is more about his acting
skills than his intelligence.
As I noted on Twitter recently:
The best actor I've ever seen in my life:
pic.twitter.com/EZ263Ly1LT
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz)
February 28, 2015
That, more than anything else, is the Oracle of Omaha’s
secret weapon.