He eventually found a house he could afford in the Capitol View neighborhood of Atlanta, and the company gave him the code to a lock on the door that would enable him to get into the house and look around. The home, a small bungalow, was a fixer-upper. There was a hole in the roof, no stove or refrigerator, and tree branches invading the property. But Anderson knew how to work with his hands. He could put his own time and money into fixing up the home, he thought, which made it a good deal. The money he had to pay monthly, at $495, was less than he was paying in rent at the time. After a $1,000 deposit, he was told, the home, worth $46,750, would be his. (Harbour’s attorney declined to comment on the experiences of Anderson or any other specific individual.)

The contract, sent to him in the mail, also required that he paid all taxes on the property and kept the property insured. If he failed to make any of the agreed-upon payments, the contract said, he would forfeit all the money he had paid to the seller. He signed and initialed the contract in front of a notary, and sent it back to the company. A little while later, he received a letter in the mail congratulating him on becoming a homeowner. He could move in once he changed the locks, it said. He never met a single person from Harbour throughout the whole process.

Of course, it could be argued that Anderson should have known better than to enter into this type of contract, that he should have read the fine print. That he should have persevered until he could buy a home the traditional way. Harbour’s lawyer told me the individuals were provided “full disclosure” of the nature of the arrangement before they even first visited the homes. “It would be impossible for any reasonable person to not understand the nature of the transaction,” Stein said. But Anderson had never bought a home before. He didn’t know that this wasn’t the traditional way homes were sold. “I thought I went and bought a house,” he told me. He thought he had just stumbled across a deal.

He also didn’t know how difficult it would be to keep up the terms of the contract, because he didn’t realize just how much work the house would need. There is no requirement that a home inspector look at the house before a contract-for-deed agreement is signed. When Harbour told him he needed to get insurance, he says, the insurance company started sending him problems with the house that he didn’t even know existed—one document he showed me, for example, informed him that his “rake board,” which is a piece of wood near his eaves, was showing deterioration.

Harbour Portfolio Properties in DeKalb County, Georgia

There is nothing inherently wrong with contract-for-deed arrangements, says Satter, whose father, Mark Satter, helped organize Chicago residents against the practice in the 1950s. It’s still possible for sellers who aren’t banks to finance properties in a fair way, she said. A San Francisco start-up called Divvy, for instance, is testing a rent-to-own model in Ohio and Georgia that gives would-be buyers some equity in the home, even if they default on payments. But there are two reasons these contract-for-deed agreements seem particularly unfair, Satter said. First, the homes that many of these companies buy are in terrible condition—many had been vacant for years before being purchased, unlike the homes sold for contract for deed in the 1950s, which frequently had been left behind by white homeowners fleeing to the suburbs. Fixer-uppers make it even more difficult for would-be buyers to fulfill all the terms of their contracts, because the houses need so much work.