21st Mortgage Class Action Lawsuit: Tatick, Robinson, and Verdicts

There is no active class action lawsuit against 21st Mortgage Corporation. The only putative class action filed directly against the company in recent years, Tatick v. 21st Mortgage Corporation, alleged harassing debt collection calls and was voluntarily dismissed less than three months after it landed in federal court. Individual borrowers have sued the Knoxville-based manufactured home lender over failed loans, foreclosure disputes, and consumer protection violations, and journalists have documented complaints about its lending practices, but no class action against 21st Mortgage has produced a judgment for plaintiffs.

The Tatick Class Action Over Debt Collection Calls

Kathy Tatick, a California resident, filed the most prominent class action against 21st Mortgage. She sued in the Superior Court of California, County of San Diego, in March 2022. The case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in January 2023 as Tatick v. 21st Mortgage Corporation et al., Case No. 3:23-cv-00108.¹

Tatick alleged a pattern of aggressive collection calling. According to the complaint, 21st Mortgage called her cell phone 10 to 15 times per day, sometimes redialing at five- to ten-minute intervals, and used demeaning language on the calls. She said the company called as early as 7:30 a.m., deliberately avoided leaving voicemails to prompt callbacks, and kept calling after she asked it to stop and after she cured her loan default.²

The proposed class covered all borrowers whose manufactured or mobile home mortgages were serviced by 21st Mortgage in the four years before the complaint was filed and who received collection calls from the company. The claims were brought under California’s Rosenthal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the state’s Unfair Competition Law.²

The case never reached a ruling on the merits. Tatick filed a notice of voluntary dismissal without prejudice on April 14, 2023. No public reason was given.³ A dismissal without prejudice leaves the door open for a refiling, but no successor class action against 21st Mortgage has been reported on the public dockets in the file.

Robinson v. 21st Mortgage: A $2.98 Million Verdict, Then Reversal

The largest individual verdict against 21st Mortgage in recent memory did not survive appeal. Raymond Robinson, an Alabama man, contracted with Emerald Homes, LLC in December 2016 to buy a mobile home and sought financing through 21st Mortgage. The company issued a pre-approval notice on November 30, 2016, that expired January 29, 2017. Acting on instructions from Emerald Homes, Robinson demolished his existing house, which he valued at roughly $60,000, to prepare the site.⁴

The loan never closed. By the time the pre-approval expired, 21st Mortgage had not received Robinson’s property deed, proof of mortgage satisfaction, or the full $4,058 down payment; Robinson had paid $4,000. A mandatory three-day waiting period on an appraisal report issued January 26 also had not elapsed. After the expiration, 21st Mortgage treated the application as new, ran a fresh credit check on January 30, and denied the loan, citing insufficient income and a new collection item on Robinson’s credit report. He moved in with his son and later bought a travel trailer.⁴

Robinson sued in Baldwin Circuit Court on claims including promissory fraud and the tort of outrage. A jury awarded $2,980,000: $200,000 in compensatory and $1 million in punitive damages on the fraud claim, plus $780,000 in compensatory and $1 million in punitive damages on the outrage claim.⁴

On December 20, 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court reversed the verdict. The court found that Robinson had not produced sufficient evidence that 21st Mortgage intended to deceive him when it issued the pre-approval, and that because he failed to meet the funding conditions before it expired, the company’s obligation to fund was never triggered. On the outrage claim, the court held the failed loan did not amount to conduct “so extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency,” the high bar Alabama sets for that tort.⁴

Other Individual Lawsuits

Several other borrowers have taken 21st Mortgage to court individually. None was brought as a class action, and none has produced a lasting judgment against the company.

Diann Martin sued in October 2021 in Prince George’s County Circuit Court in Maryland, alleging breach of contract and consumer protection violations tied to unrepaired defects at a property she purchased. The trial court dismissed the case because Martin had not first gone through mediation as her sales contract required, and the Appellate Court of Maryland affirmed that ruling in March 2024, holding the mediation clause was a “condition precedent” to filing suit.⁵
Paul French filed a consumer credit lawsuit against 21st Mortgage in 2023 (Case No. 1:23-cv-03528). The case reached the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued an unpublished opinion in July 2025 before the matter was terminated.⁶
Marsha Lynne Hopkins fought a foreclosure dispute in West Virginia after she and 21st Mortgage reached a settlement calling for monthly payments in exchange for rescinding a foreclosure sale. When the company alleged she breached the deal and sought possession of her home, the matter reached the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Hopkins maintained she had complied, and evidence submitted to the court supported her claim.⁷

Investigative Reporting on 21st Mortgage’s Lending Practices

The complaints that show up in the lawsuits sit within a broader body of investigative reporting on 21st Mortgage and the wider Clayton Homes lending operation. A joint series by The Seattle Times, the Center for Public Integrity, and BuzzFeed News documented what reporters characterized as predatory practices across the Clayton empire.

Reporters found that Clayton-affiliated dealers frequently steered buyers toward 21st Mortgage or its sibling lender, Vanderbilt Mortgage, at times telling customers these were the only financing options. Kevin Carroll, a former Clayton-affiliated dealer, said 21st Mortgage gave him discounts on his own inventory loans when he directed buyers to the lender. Doug Farley, a former general manager at Clayton dealerships, described receiving profit-sharing payments on Clayton-originated loans until around 2008.⁸

Loan terms drew particular attention. According to the Center for Public Integrity, 93 percent of Clayton’s loans over a four-year period required extra federal disclosure because of their costly terms, with interest rates sometimes above 15 percent. Clayton-affiliated loans in 2013 carried interest rates that averaged seven percentage points above typical home loans, compared with 3.8 points for other mobile home lenders. Some borrowers described bait-and-switch scenarios in which promised rates were raised at closing after they had already spent money preparing home sites.⁸

Refinancing was rare. Despite promises reportedly made at the point of sale, Clayton-affiliated lenders almost never refinanced loans. Federal data from 2010 to 2013 showed Clayton accounted for well under one percent of mobile home refinancings while originating more than a third of purchase loans in that period. One borrower couple, Kirk and Patricia Ackley, reported that a 21st Mortgage supervisor told them: “We don’t care. We’ll come take a chainsaw to it — cut it up and haul it out in boxes.”⁹

Regulatory Actions

Direct regulatory enforcement against 21st Mortgage itself has been limited. The most notable action on the public record is a consent order with the New York State Department of Financial Services. That order found 21st Mortgage had operated an unauthorized branch office at its Knoxville, Tennessee headquarters to conduct mortgage business related to New York properties, in violation of Section 591(3) of the New York Banking Law. The company paid a $5,000 fine and agreed that all New York mortgage business would be conducted through properly authorized locations.¹⁰

Enforcement has been more significant against 21st Mortgage’s corporate sibling. In January 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. The CFPB alleged Vanderbilt issued loans to manufactured home buyers while ignoring “clear and obvious” signs the borrowers could not repay them, including instances where borrowers were already in arrears on existing debts. The case was short-lived. The CFPB filed a notice of voluntary dismissal with prejudice on February 27, 2025, and the case closed the next day.¹¹ That action targeted Vanderbilt, not 21st Mortgage, though both operate under Clayton Homes.

1
CourtListener. Tatick v. 21st Mortgage Corporation
2
ClassAction.org. Tatick v. 21st Mortgage Corporation et al., Complaint
3
ClassAction.org. Class Action Alleges 21st Mortgage Corporation Unlawfully Placed Repeated Harassing Phone Calls to Borrowers
4
FindLaw. 21st Mortgage Corporation v. Robinson, SC-2023-0304
5
Courts of Maryland. Diann Martin v. 21st Mortgage Corporation, No. 123, September Term, 2023
6
PACER Monitor. Paul French v. 21st Mortgage Corporation
7
Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. State of West Virginia ex rel. 21st Mortgage Corporation v. Stowers and Hopkins, Case No. 22-0334
8
Center for Public Integrity. Warren Buffett’s Mobile Home Empire Preys on the Poor
9
University of Michigan Wallace House. Baker Wagner Investigation
10
NY Department of Financial Services. Consent Order, 21st Mortgage Corporation
11
CFPB. Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance Inc. Enforcement Action