Elizabeth Warren Bought Foreclosed Homes to Make a Quick Profit

Before the crash that she blamed on speculators, Senator Elizabeth Warren made a bundle by flipping houses.

By Jillian Kay Melchior & Eliana Johnson — 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.

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. 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.”

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.

"Senator Warren's zeal to throw more people into the Bastille has led her to criticize the SEC Chairman for … recusing herself where there might be the appearance of conflict of interest. The criticism seems to be that it is somehow quite 'damaging' when the SEC cannot throw the book at people in cases that convince only two of the SEC commissioners. … Running over due process will indeed create real damage. We should choose due process over the anger of the people wearing Phrygian caps."