Posted on 05/27/2015 4:04:52 AM PDT by markomalley
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.
Five months after purchasing Veo Vessels’ old home, Warren flipped the property, selling it for $115,000 more than she’d paid.
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.
(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.
Warren bought two homes after they’d fallen into foreclosure. Records suggest she sold them at a significant profit without making any meaningful upgrades.
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.
Warren is just a small scale marxist of the “ruling elite” variety. They’ve existed throughout the ages from the medieval kings owning all their land and ruling over their serfs to the Chi Coms holding exclusive power and amazing billions in their own modern day version of serfdom. These people are not capitalists, they’re looters on a large scale.
I smell Hillary 2016 campaign opposition research.
Zillow has the house being sold in 2013 for $480k.
I don’t know the area so I can’t speculate. EW bought the house in ‘93 for $30,000, did some work on it, and sold it for $115,000, also in ‘93. If it sold for $480k in 2003, it sounds like the neighborhood has prospered.
I do not have a problem with this at all. IF she did not buy these houses, some other house flipper would have. As evidenced by TV shows like Flip or Flop, these homes are always a “can of worms”. Most people do not have the guts to do what some people are willing to do. It is not Warren’s fault that these properties went onto foreclosure or were in distress. Flippers in general by the bottom of real estate markets because they are willing to make an offer when normal buyers are not. It takes capital and market knowledge(knowing what a property is worth when repaired). Also, if you notice, ALL house flippers are also real estate agents. They never give 3-5% to some other real estate broker for listing their properties.
I say good for Warren. She helped the real estate market in OKC find a bottom and eventually go up.
typing faster than thinking:
into not onto
buy not by
It is an old neighborhood that is being restored. Not restored by the government but by people who are buying those homes, fixing them up, and living there. It is "the thing to do" in OKC for some people. There are still some big homes, like 4,000 sq feet that are in need of repair. Problem is you can't get them for 30k anymore.
I know flippers who have done everything from a cosmetic refresh of a basically sound house to complete gut jobs. One neighbor with good construction skills flipped a few houses, and then started holding and renting them. In a transitional neighborhood, he found fixer-uppers for a song. He put the necessary work into them, and now manages over 20 rental properties. As he has no apparent vices and drives sensible vehicles, I imagine he will be quite affluent if he ever sells out and retires.
My my my.....good to see that the Clinton oppo-research attack team has not lost it’s touch.
1993 was 22 years ago. She's had the taste, what she wants is for no one else to get a taste.
Some of the biggest eyesores in DC during my time here have been neighborhoods in which the government got control of too much distressed property, with the stated aim of redevelopment, and then ... sat ... and sat ... and sat ... and sat. The politicians quarreled. The advocacy groups spun pipedreams, to be financed, of course, with other people's money. Any market-oriented attempt at residential or commercial redevelopment was denounced as profiteering. And so it went, sometimes for decades.
An ounce of planning goes a long way. There are some key decisions that only government can make, and getting those right is crucial to successful redevelopment. But government very easily becomes the dead hand. DC reached a point after the Marion Barry years in which leaders like Anthony Williams and Adrian Fenty were willing to take responsibility, make decisions, and allow markets to drive redevelopment. Night and day.
Agree... most of these neighborhoods in OKC are private owned and the government not really involved. That’s probably why the transformation has been a success...
I rented twice from a gentleman who, like your friend, owned 20 houses. He told me he had 60 apartments total. These were all older Victorian style houses that had been converted to apartment houses. He kept them in good shape but not so fancy that his real estate taxes would go up.
He kept his rent a little lower then the going rate. That way he stated tenants would stay longer, sometimes five years or more. He said where you lost money was when you had to rent the apartment and there was usually one month rent lost in the transition. Also, by keep tenants longer, you did not have to replace carpet, refinish floors and repaint walls and ceilings which you typically di between tenants. He also did not typically allow pets. Pets cause damage. Lastly, he was certified to do plumbing, heating and electrical(NH) on his own properties. This was a major cost controller for him. He did not ever have to call a plumber at 2am unless he was on vacation.
His company vehicle was a full size pick up truck. He used this to plow the driveways of the houses. He would also work out a deal with one of the tenants/house to mow the lawn. He would give them a break on the rent for doing this. He would make them the super of each house.
He is now retired, but has passed the business down to his daughter and son in law.
I think they call that psychopathy, the main characteristic of politicians of all stripes. It's why we need an intact Constitution and a real rule of law.
Which is why the boundaries keep expanding. People intuitively understand why a DC neighborhood like Capitol Hill would bounce back. But when I tell them that places like Trinidad, Ivy City, Rosedale, and (now, just starting ...) Langston-Carver are popping ... not to mention big chunks of Anacostia ... their eyes bug out. Those names may not mean anything to folks from elsewhere around the country, but locals will know that, not very long ago, they were strict no-go areas. A virtuous cycle is fun to watch once it gets going.
Of course, one still needs an underlying economic motor. If the local employers are shutting down and laying off, rehabbing comes to a screeching halt. Here in DC. we have always had the federal economic boost, although since the 1980's, a growing majority of the jobs have been in the private sector as the region has grown a more balanced, tech-oriented economy. Gentrification is also driven by increasing congestion in the suburbs, which is only going to get worse. Some of those old, battered inner city neighborhoods start to look good if your alternative is spending four hours a day in your car.
Ping.
And the hypocrite is the new HERETIC.
That should be hung like an ANVIL around her neck as well as the fact that she made...gasp, PROFIT!!! She is a liar, taking advantage of poor and feable old folks!
All this talk of ‘she did nothing wrong except be a hypocrite” pisses me off. Go for the throat people! Her and the left have declared conservatives the enemy so this is war. Turn their tactics back on them!
No.
But I am disgusted with her, and I despise her, because she wants capitalism for HER and her family, but pushes forced socialism for me and mine.
Yes! Hooray for the lying Marxist!
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