http://www.noss123.com/ In a mortgage by legal charge, the debtor remains the legal owner of the property, but the creditor gains sufficient rights over it to enable them to enforce their security, such as a right to take possession of the property or sell it. To protect the lender, a mortgage by legal charge is usually recorded in a public register. Since mortgage debt is often the largest debt owed by the debtor, banks and other mortgage lenders run title searches of the real property to make certain that there are no mortgages already registered on the debtor's property which might have higher priority. Tax liens, in some cases, will come ahead of mortgages. For this reason, if a borrower has delinquent property taxes, the bank will often pay them to prevent the lienholder from foreclosing and wiping out the mortgage. This type of mortgage is common in the United States and, since 1925, it has been the usual form of mortgage in England and Wales (it is now the only form - see above). In Scotland, the mortgage by legal charge is also known as standard security. Prices are often much cheaper than most areas of the U.S., but in many locations prices of houses and lots are as expensive as the US, one example being Mexico City. U.S. banks have begun to give home loans for properties in Mexico, but, so far, not for other Central American countries. One important difference from the United States is that each country has rules regarding where foreigners can buy. For example, in Mexico, they cannot buy land or homes within 50km of the coast or 100km from a border, while, in Honduras, they may buy beach front property. There are also different special rules regarding certain types of property: *ejidos* - communally held farm property - cannot be sold to anyone, but that does not prevent them from being offered for sale. Many websites advertising and selling Mexican and Central American real estate exist, but they may need to be researched. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://bioinformatics.org/pipermail/bbs-users/attachments/20070822/d5d8910d/attachment.html