My wife and I were house shopping. In the spring of 2006 we had purchased a piece of property with a dilapidated house on the site for a very cheap price. We wanted to demolish the house and have a double wide moved onto the site. Within our area there were three mobile home dealerships, one of the being Clayton, the first that we visited.
The sales rep showed us some homes that were in our price range, we picked out a couple that we were interested in. We began discussing how the process works. After explaining that we had an existing foundation and wouldn't need that added into the price, he insisted that the foundation was too old and not properly completed. Amazing, he'd never seen the foundation to be making any judgments, but I'm sure he was judging his commission for getting another contract connected to this sale.
He invited us into his office and we started talking about prices and payments. I assured him we had already secured financing, we just had to pick our home. He kept insisting that he could do better than what he had been approved for and asked if he could run a quick application on our credit. I then informed him I didn't want anything new showing up on my credit as every inquiry lowers your score thus making your credit score lower.
The man looked me in the eyes and said that it wouldn't be a full report and thus it wouldn't show up on our credit report at all, we had nothing to worry about.
When time came to complete the mortgage, low and behold, there was Clayton Homes listed as an inquirer and we were questioned as to why we had sought someone out! We looked like fools after having our mortgage approved.
A sales person is a sales person anywhere, they'll lie to get as much money as they want. We decided against Clayton, and found a small town dealer that was up front with us about everything. We did need to make some modifications from the foundation to meet newer codes, but it didn't need to be completely tore out and started from scratch as the liar had stated.
