This data lists the title lenders located in Georgia that were identified by ProPublica and The Current, a nonprofit newsroom based in Savannah, Georgia.
Title lenders in Georgia are regulated under the state’s pawn shop statutes and licensed at the local level, so there is no official statewide list of storefronts that offer “title pawns.”
ProPublica and The Current compiled this list using information from Google Maps and corporate websites, along with vehicle lien data from Georgia Department of Revenue’s motor vehicle division. The news organizations also verified locations by calling stores and checking company websites to ensure that they were in operation and issued title pawns. Online-based title lenders are not included.
Some of the state’s licensed installment lenders offer auto-secured loans; however, these locations were excluded unless they referred to their product specifically as a “title pawn.”
This data was finalized in October 2022. However, because this list was compiled over the course of several months, it is possible that a limited number of store openings and closures that occurred close to the time of the data’s publication may not be reflected.
Counties and state legislative districts were added to this data using spatial joins with the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER shapefiles and the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Georgia legislative district shapefiles, respectively.
ProPublica and The Current found that these title lending storefronts are disproportionately located in lower-income ZIP codes and those with higher proportions of people of color.
For more detail on our analysis of the title-lending industry in Georgia, see the original story and the section at the end titled, “How We Measured the Title-Lending Industry in Georgia.”
Provided in collaboration with The Current
