By Melanie Cleveland -- San Luis Obispo County’s hard-money real estate lending industry — which helped fuel the area’s building boom by collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from local investors for housing and commercial projects — fell into nearly complete disarray this year.The owners of two Central Coast lending companies, Paso Robles’ bankrupt Estate Financial and Santa Maria’s Pacific Coast Mortgage, pleaded guilty to multiple crimes, including defrauding their investors by operating Ponzi schemes. Four other local key players in the industry — Jay Hurst Miller of Hurst Financial, Candy Wells of Heritage Lending, Tammy Jordan of Real Property Lenders and Don Vaughn of Country Financial — have been forced into or voluntarily filed for Chapter 7 personal bankruptcy while battling potentially costly civil lawsuits alleging fraud or breach of contract in their alleged failure to return their creditors’ money.

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