# Assets

> Assets tests whether the promised payment can be supported by the borrower's resources and obligations

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:real-estate-mortgage:borrower-underwriting:assets` |
| Family | Borrower Underwriting |
| Domain | Economics |
| Era | Institutional Age → Agentic Age |
| Kind | concept |
| Archetype | The Tension |
| Claim layers | empirical, cultural_historical, synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory |

## What it is

Assets is a concept in the Borrower Underwriting family, defined here by the function it performs in the property system rather than by label alone.

## What it actually does

Assets tests whether the promised payment can be supported by the borrower's resources and obligations.

## Why it exists

It exists because place is unique and immovable while law, capital, information, and human lives must still coordinate around it across time.

## System mechanics

- **Who uses it:** owner, occupant, buyer, seller, lender, investor, steward, regulator
- **Incentives:** access, certainty, control, value, continuity
- **Inputs:** place, people, records, rules, resources, time
- **Outputs:** rights, constraints, uses, relationships, consequences
- **Dependencies:** Land, Authority, Information, Capital, Time

## Archetypal reading

- **Essence:** Assets tests whether the promised payment can be supported by the borrower's resources and obligations
- **Gift:** Clarity about assets makes a hidden allocation of place, time, authority, value, or risk available for deliberate choice.
- **Wound / Shadow:** When assets is treated as neutral or inevitable, its costs can be shifted to people who hold less information, authority, liquidity, or mobility.
- **Failure mode:** The failure mode appears when assets is stale, opaque, mispriced, misrecorded, overextended, or applied outside the conditions that made it useful.

## Lenses

- **Personal:** Notice where assets appears as a structure in your own commitments: what is held, promised, priced, protected, excluded, or deferred?
- **Business:** Assets reveals a handoff among information, authority, incentives, operating work, and capital. Make the owner of each handoff explicit.
- **Financial:** Assets changes the timing, priority, comparability, liquidity, or distribution of cash flow and risk.
- **Property:** Assets changes how a physical place can be used, valued, financed, transferred, occupied, maintained, or reclaimed.
- **Community:** Assets can create benefits inside one parcel while exporting costs or opportunity to neighbors, institutions, or future residents.

## Divination

The Tension enters the reading through Assets. The issue is not only what is visible; it is which map of ownership, time, risk, authority, or belonging currently governs the situation.

**Question:** What changes when Assets becomes the unit of analysis?

**Guidance:** Shift scale, clock, stakeholder, boundary, and claim layer before choosing a move.

## Game function

Creates a graph move that changes the active map. Initiative 4.

## Relationships

- **Float is administered through Assets.** Float is administered through Assets through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Income conflicts with Assets.** Income conflicts with Assets through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Assets is evidenced by Employment.** Assets is evidenced by Employment through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Assets depends on Flood Insurance.** Assets depends on Flood Insurance through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.

## Oppositions

- Use Value versus Exchange Value
- Speed versus Diligence

## Historical lineage and regulatory context

Read Assets through the lineage of Borrower Underwriting: earlier customary or local arrangements became recorded, standardized, financed, regulated, digitized, or contested over time.

Rules vary by jurisdiction and transaction. Use the cited primary sources as starting points and verify current local law, program guides, contracts, and professional standards before operational use.

## Visual direction

Text-free rounded-square enamel artifact for Assets: one dominant symbolic mechanism with a restrained secondary counterforce; vitreous midnight enamel, blackened steel, warm brass, copper accents, mortgage-paper cream, deep green, slate, and sky blue.

## Engine output / Sentinel handoff

The generative interpretation above is preserved as Engine Output. Sentinel factors: jurisdiction-specific rules, factual uncertainty. These factors request contextual review; they do not delete or silently rewrite the candidate.

## Research / provenance

- [Ability-to-Repay and Qualified Mortgage Rule](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/compliance-resources/mortgage-resources/ability-repay-qualified-mortgage-rule/) — Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; ATR/QM and residential underwriting.
- [Fannie Mae Selling Guide](https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/media/document/pdf/selling-guide-february-4-2026) — Fannie Mae; loan eligibility, underwriting, appraisal, delivery.
- [Freddie Mac Single-Family Seller/Servicer Guide](https://guide.freddiemac.com/) — Freddie Mac; loan eligibility, Loan Product Advisor, servicing.
