In the world today, fraud in lending comes as no surprise to most Americans who read their daily newspaper or turn on the TV to catch the news. Unfortunately, fraudulent business practices have become a commonplace occurrence in corporate America. Luckily there are several entities, both private & federal, that have stepped up in an attempt to minimize these crooked business practices & protect consumers from such underhandedness.
One of these organizations, called MARI or the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, Inc., has aligned itself with the manufactured housing industry. From an article entitled “Stamping Out Lending Fraud”, published by Modern Homes Magazine, the writer, Ann Parman, explains that “Recently, the Manufactured Housing Institute entered into an agreement with MARI with the goal of reducing the incidence of fraud in manufactured home loan transactions. Hopefully, the end result will be fewer loan defaults and, as a result, better loan terms for consumers. Higher defaults cost lenders more money, and that gets passed on in higher rates to consumers. In addition, the industry’s participation in MARI can help prevent consumers from obtaining loans that are too large for their budgets or for the homes they purchase, and therefore, increase their ability to build home equity.”
Essentially, MARI is an information service provider that collects reports of possible incidents of fradulent activities in the mortgage service industry MARI’s database collects & maintains two types of reports:
“1) non-public incidents of alleged fraud, material misrepresentations and other serious misconduct;
and
2) public sanctions against professionals and companies involved in the mortgage and financial services industries.”
The Manufactured Housing Institute has also created a Lender Best Practices (LBP) program, where participation in the MARI organization is mandatory. The article reports, “The members of the LBP Steering Committee felt it was important for industry lenders to become more diligent in both the detection and reporting of fraud,” said Don Scarmuzzi of DFS Consulting LLC who assisted in putting the LBP and MARI programs together.
If it wasn’t for organizations like MHI and MARI, the missteps of the past may have never been brought to attention , creating great strides towards corrections of these wrongdoings that only hurt consumers, in the end.
For more information on these organizations, please read the full article at:
http://www.manufacturedhousing.org/mhomes/images/lendingfraud.pdf
Southern Energy is a mobile home manufacturing unit of Clayton Homes Inc., which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., is now closing. 
