A Berkshire Hathaway unit that is a major lender to people buying mobile homes intentionally failed to qualify borrowers, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) alleged in a complaint. As a result, many families ultimately lost their homes and sank into debt, echoing a series of events that helped power the financial and housing crisis more than 15 years ago.
Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance, a unit of Clayton Homes, the largest mobile home manufacturer in the nation and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, didn’t comply with the Federal Truth in Lending Act (FTLA), by failing to reject families whose income profiles made it impossible for them to handle a mortgage, the CFPB said in a complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
