By Jillian Kay Melchior & Eliana Johnson
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Nearly two years after Veo Vessels died, her daughter,
70-year-old Mary Frances Hickman, decided to sell the home her mother had left
to her. A sprawling brick house in Oklahoma City’s historic Highland Park
neighborhood, it was built in 1924, just a year after Mary’s birth.
Decades later, one of Vessels’ great-grandchildren fondly
recalls the wood and tile floors, the fish pond, the butler’s quarters, and the
multi-car garage where children played house.
“It was really, really nice,” says Hickman’s granddaughter,
Andrea Martin. That’s part of the reason she’s so surprised her grandmother
sold the home in 1993 for a mere $30,000. Despite a debilitating stroke, Martin
says Hickman remained sharp, and she had always been business-savvy. As an Avon
saleswoman, she had at times ranked among the top ten in the country. “So I
don’t know why,” Martin says. “Maybe she just wanted out from underneath it,
but to sell it for such a low number — I don’t know. Maybe she got bad advice,
maybe she was just tired.”
The home’s new owner: Elizabeth Warren, today a
Massachusetts senator who has built a political career on denouncing the sort
of banking titans and financial sophisticates who make a buck off the little
guy. Five months after purchasing Veo Vessels’ old home, Warren flipped the
property, selling it for $115,000 more than she’d paid, according to Oklahoma
County Property Assessor records.
Warren rose to political prominence in the wake of the
2008 financial crisis as a crusader against big banks and a dispenser of
common-sense economic advice. She campaigned for the creation of the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, intended to shield people from the predations of
the mortgage and credit-card industries, among others. In her 2006 book All
Your Worth, co-authored with her daughter, Amelia, Warren lists as a top myth
the idea that “you can make big money buying houses and flipping them quickly.”
She has made a career out of telling people how to behave in financially
responsible ways, and out of creating laws that will make it illegal for them
to do otherwise.
But Warren bought and sold at least five properties for
profit at a different time in her life, before the cratering economy and a
political career made her a star. Her life story has been the subject of much
interest, and her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance, chronicled her rise from
humble beginnings in small-town Oklahoma and her struggle to make ends meet. It
didn’t much mention, though, the early 1990s, years when her children were
teenagers and she was once again happily married. These are years when she
wasn’t yet the multimillionaire she is today, and, she has said, she was voting
Republican.
As a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania,
and later as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, she was doing well for
herself, building both her professional profile and her wealth. She owes at
least part of her considerable financial success, it seems, to snapping up
these properties in her native Oklahoma and turning them for a profit — though
today that’s not a practice she endorses for the many people looking to emulate
her success. The Boston Herald reported on these purchases during Warren’s
Senate run in 2012, noting that she invested in “the often topsy-turvy
real-estate market of the 1990s” and that her actions “don’t seem to square
with her public statements about the latest real estate boom and bust.”
(By our deadline, Warren’s office did not respond to our
request for an interview with the senator or for a request for comment from the
senator’s spokesperson about the home sales.)
Hickman’s granddaughter Martin says of the home flip: “I
don’t think it’s right, but I don’t really know much about it. . . . You flip
houses to make a profit, so I can’t really fault [Warren] much. I think my
grandmother made a mistake by selling it for so cheap. . . . She had worked
hard all her life and was a self-made woman.”
Don Vessels — a grandson of Veo Vessels, and the nephew
of Mary Frances Hickman — said he had not known that Warren had purchased the
family home, but “my reaction is that it’s kind of par for the course.” He
added: “What’s said and what’s done in politics are two different things. Mary
Hickman, being the executor of the estate, should have sold it for the highest
price on the market, which I’m not sure she did. But the house was not in
fantastic shape, I can tell you that. It was a very nice house when it was
purchased, but my grandmother kind of let it fall into disrepair.”
Records show Warren bought the house Hickman inherited
from her mother, located at 200 N.W. 16th Street, in August 1993 and quickly
obtained permits to do plumbing and electrical work, selling it five months
later for a 383 percent gain.
House flipping is commonly defined as the practice of
buying and selling a home within six months, as the future senator did with the
Hickman property. Warren held onto at least four other properties for longer
periods, sometimes waiting a year before relinquishing ownership and, at other
times, as long as seven years.
Warren bought two homes after they’d fallen into
foreclosure. And though she spent money fixing up the Hickman home before
selling it, records suggest she sold others at a significant profit without
making any meaningful upgrades.
In 1993, Warren bought a foreclosed property on N.W. 14th
Street in Oklahoma City for $4,000. National Review attempted to contact the
couple who had owned it. No phone number or email could be found on record for
them, and they did not respond to a letter mailed to their last known address,
in Colorado. No public records could be found elaborating on the events that
led to the foreclosure of their home.
In 2004, Warren transferred the home to her brother, John
Herring, and his wife, who sold it for $30,000 in 2006, a 650 percent increase
over what Warren initially paid for it. Neither Warren nor her brother filed
any permits to make improvements.
In June 1993, Warren bought another foreclosed property
in Oklahoma City, this one on West Wilshire Boulevard, for $61,000 from the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Because properties purchased
from HUD are sold as is, and because foreclosed homes can have damage ranging
from simple poor upkeep to stripped copper, “the only reason you do that is for
profit,” says Steve Stout, residential field supervisor at the Oklahoma County
Assessor’s Office.
On the national stage, Warren has been outspoken about
the dangers of home foreclosure. In a 2002 book, The Fragile Middle Class,
co-authored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Lawrence Westerbrook, she wrote that
foreclosures are “notorious for fetching low prices.” And as a professor at
Harvard Law School, in the wake of the financial crisis, Warren served as a
member of the congressional panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The panel produced, among other things, a report on the
foreclosures taking place across the country. It began with a paean to the
place of the home in American life: “Foreclosures are about the home,” it said,
which is “the physical and emotional nexus of many households as well as the
centerpiece of many Americans’ finances.” Foreclosures, it concluded, “can harm
other homeowners both by encouraging additional foreclosures and by reducing
home sale prices, while decreased property values hurt local businesses and
reduce state and local tax revenues.”
A year after buying the foreclosed property on West
Wilshire Boulevard, Warren also bought the house next door for $72,000. Despite
filing no building permits to renovate at either property, Warren pocketed
$34,000 in profits when she sold the first house in December 1994, and she and
her husband, Bruce Mann, made an additional $32,000 when they sold the one next
door in 1998.
That same year, Warren sold another home she and Mann
owned for a sizeable profit. The couple had purchased the property, at 4721
Dove Tree Lane, in 1991, filing permits for mechanical and plumbing repairs,
according to Oklahoma County Assessor’s Office records.
“We’re talking about more than just painting or minor
repairs,” says Stout, adding that it could add up to tens of thousands of
dollars. “It’s serious work.” Still, the investment seems to have paid off:
Warren and her husband paid only $50,000 for the house and sold it for
$109,500, a 119 percent gain.
The profits from these flipped homes adds up: Even
excluding the property sold by her brother, Warren and her husband have made at
least $240,500 flipping homes (before deducting the unknown sum they invested
in remodeling). In her 2014 autobiography, Warren wrote of the events that
precipitated the financial crisis that “everyone seemed to have a story about
someone they knew who was getting rich by flipping houses.”
She omitted a crucial one.
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