Finance the land on a non-financeable house?
Some lenders will make loans for vacant land, others will not. You have to discuss with local bank what are your plan for the land: live in the old mobile home; install a new mobile home; build a new house; Sell it to a developer; use it for camping... Is the property part of a development with other mobile homes? If so there may be complications regarding the use and rights of the property. Some local jurisdictions also want to eliminate mobile homes, so they may put limitations on the housing options.
Insurance you purchase is paid to you. However, even if the home is destroyed, you still owe all the money to the bank, and you no longer have the house as part of the land's value to guarantee the loan. So depending on how much the land is still worth versus how much you owe -- and exactly what the terms of the loan are -- you may need to use some or all of that money to repay enough of the loan to bring it back within the bank's policies. Read the terms of the loan -- consider asking a lawyer to clarify it for you if necessary; having a lawyer review that kind of major contract is always wise anyway. – "The Answer is yes according to multiple online sources and my local bank. This approach is a common technique to building your own home. You finance the land, build the simplest possible dwelling (say a garage with 1 bathroom/bedroom), refi into a mortgage and get cash back and then build your ""real house"" or add on, etc. This eliminates the banks demands that come with a ""construction loan"" and saves you 10s of thousands in the process (fees, contractors, scheduling, design, etc)" "No no no no!!!!  Do not spend 25k on a damn slab of concrete when you don't even own the land! You are not ""truly"" the owner unless you legally own the land. I don't care what country your talking about. If you like I'll come over to your place, mix and pour some concrete on the floor, and you can pay me 5 euro. Deal? Buy the smallest parcel of land you can find. Own the land. Pour some concrete on it and viola!!!" You need a mixture of real estate, funds, and cash in the bank. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never wise.  I would also stay away from land-banking period... Like you had mentioned, scam after scam after scam... Here in Tokyo, Royal Siam Trust (White Sands Beach?) is the token land-banking scam... funny enough it was hosted by the OP... You're right.   That's a large part of what I talked about in my post, I just didn't call it that.  The other provision of Title III (aka CROWDFUND Act) is that all the equity has to be purchased through a brokerage or funding portal. I mentioned those in another post in this thread. It depends on the bank - In some cases(mine included :) ) the bank allowed for this but Emma had to sign on a document waiving the rights for the house in case the bank needs to liquidate assets in to recover their mortgage in case of delays or non-payment of dues in time. This had to be signed after taking independent legal advice from a legal adviser. Check your mortgage paper work. Most mortgages have clauses requiring you to maintain the property, keep it in good repair, and to prevent spoilage. The property is the mortgagee's security for the loan, so it's reasonable that they have a voice in keeping the property in good shape. You can tell them to pound sand, and then they can call the loan due in full. They're probably talking about flipping houses. The conventional wisdom when flipping is to purchase the property with a mortgage or other loan on day-0. Do the work to rehabilitate it. Get it listed for re-sale promptly (this step has varying strategies) with a profitable price but one that will make it move. Have the house sold on or before the first payment would be due. This is anywhere from 30 to 60 days. The flipper then never has to make a payment on the mortgage or loan, the costs of rehabilitating the home are recovered promptly (potentially before any loan, credit card payments, or invoices are due), and there is a profit. This also assumes that either a 100% loan or some other mechanism is used to address closing costs and fees. This model fits the premise of the infomercial in that you make money investing in real estate but never have to tie up any of your own money in the process. "The whole story of ""Pamela Shea"" is so light on facts that it makes it hard for me to see what happened to her as example of a problem, let alone a tragedy.  What kind of weird house purchase involves the forfeiture of the down payment in the event you can't get financing?  Yes, there is money you commit when you make an offer on a house that is non-refundable, but it's less than 1% of the value - it's not the ""down payment"".  And if the life savings of a woman with a ""six-figure income"" are less than 1% of the cost of the home she's buying, then I'd say she's not ready to buy a home, or she needs to look at less expensive property." There are a few ways to get money from property, but I'm not sure any would work for you: 1) Firstly you could sell it. Selling the building might require enough repairs that the building is habitable; if the repair costs are too high, you might not be able to recover costs from selling. For a particularly old and unkempt building, this is more likely to be the case. In extreme scenarios, you may earn more net profit by demolishing a decrepit building, and simply selling the land. Make sure you aren't setting your price too high if you are desperate to sell; dropping your price might make the headache of upkeep go away, and might be better for you financially in the long run. 2) You could rent it - but if it is so uninhabitable you can't sell it, then this is unlikely without repairs (and it seems you don't want to do this anyway). 3) If your building is in an area where the zoning laws are not strict, you may be able to apply for a permit to have it zoned for commercial use - and either run a business out of it, or rent it to someone else to do so. Again, this would be dependent on repairs if the building is uninhabitable, and also would require the building to well-situated for a business. 4) You could take out a mortgage on the building. Of course, this has two big caveats: (a) the bank would need to assess the building for value [and it seems not to be worth much in your case]; and (b) this provides only temporary cash, which you would need to pay back to the bank over time. In some cases, if you had a solid plan, you might be able to take a mortgage out against the value of the land, and use the cash from the mortgage to do some repairs, so that it would be in good shape for selling. No. As long as you live in the house for 3 years, it's yours to keep. Financing has nothing to do with that. I don't know any clever way to do what you're describing.  And, in a sense, you can see why there might not be one.  A mortgage isn't just a magical way to reduce your housing expenses; it's a tradeoff in which you agree to a long-term commitment in exchange for fixed costs (or at least costs with a prearranged structure) over that long term.  If you're unwilling to accept the obligation of paying for and maintaining the property over a long period, you can't really expect to reap the benefits of lowered costs.  Part of the reason people say buying is better is because people often do live in the same place for a long time, in which case, if they rent, they might miss out on savings they could have had if they bought instead.  If you're not going to live in the same place for a long time, buying may not actually be better for you. Obviously you're missing that there is no house on the land so the cost comparison between a house and land isn't terribly valid.   The land might not have connections to the municipal sewage/power/electrical and may need zoning changes and permits for those connections.   You're missing that you don't know how to design and build a house so you'll need to hire people for those tasks; then live through the process, headaches, and probable budget overruns. Edit: You're also missing that lending for speculative land development is significantly different from lending for a single family home. "Not at all impossible. What you need is Fundamental Analysis and Relationship with your investment. If you are just buying shares - not sure you can have those. I will provide examples from my personal experience:  My mother has barely high school education. When she saw house and land prices in Bulgaria, she thought it's impossibly cheap. We lived on rent in Israel, our horrible apartment was worth $1M and it was horrible. We could never imagine buying it because we were middle class at best. My mother insisted that we all sell whatever we have and buy land and houses in Bulgaria. One house, for example, went from $20k to EUR150k between 2001 and 2007. But we knew Bulgaria, we knew how to buy, we knew lawyers, we knew builders.  The company I currently work for. When I joined, share prices were around 240 (2006). They are now (2015) at 1500. I didn't buy because I was repaying mortgage (at 5%). I am very sorry I didn't. Everybody knew 240 is not a real share price for our company - an established (+30 years) software company with piles of cash. We were not a hot startup, outsiders didn't invest. Many developers and finance people WHO WORK IN THE COMPANY made a fortune. Again: relationship, knowledge!  I bought a house in the UK in 2012 - everyone knew house prices were about to go up. I was lucky I had a friend who was a surveyor, he told me: ""buy now or lose money"". I bought a little house for 200k, it is now worth 260k. Not double, but pretty good money!  My point is: take your investment personally. Don't just dump money into something. Once you are an insider, your risk will be almost mitigated and you could buy where you see an opportunity and sell when you feel you are near the maximal real worth of your investment. It's not hard to analyse, it's hard to make a commitment." "That is called ""substitution of collateral."" And yes, it can be done, but only with consent of the lender. The ""best case"" for this kind of maneuver is if the second house is larger and more valuable than the first. Another possibility is that you have two mortgages on the first house and none on the second, and you want to move the second mortgage on the first house to the second one, effectively making it a ""first"" mortgage. In these instances, the lender has a clear incentive to allow a substitution of collateral, because the second one is actually better than the first one. The potential problem in your case, is if the second house were more expensive than the first house, you could not use the sale proceeds of the first house as to buy the second house without borrowing additional money. In that case, a possible solution would be to go back to the lender on your first house for a larger mortgage, with the proceeds of that mortgage being used to retire the earlier mortgage. Depending on your credit, payment record, etc. they might be willing to do this."