# Land Contract

> Land Contract serves a timing, documentation, collateral, or borrower profile outside ordinary channels

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:real-estate-mortgage:alternative-finance:land-contract` |
| Family | Alternative & Non-QM Finance |
| Domain | Economics |
| Era | Agentic Age |
| Kind | governance-mechanism |
| Archetype | The Charter |
| Claim layers | empirical, cultural_historical, synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory |

## What it is

Land Contract is a governance mechanism in the Alternative & Non-QM Finance family, defined here by the function it performs in the property system rather than by label alone.

## What it actually does

Land Contract serves a timing, documentation, collateral, or borrower profile outside ordinary channels.

## 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:** legitimacy, clarity, enforceability, administrative efficiency
- **Inputs:** place, people, records, rules, resources, time
- **Outputs:** rights, constraints, uses, relationships, consequences
- **Dependencies:** Land, Authority, Information, Capital, Time

## Archetypal reading

- **Essence:** Land Contract serves a timing, documentation, collateral, or borrower profile outside ordinary channels
- **Gift:** Clarity about land contract makes a hidden allocation of place, time, authority, value, or risk available for deliberate choice.
- **Wound / Shadow:** When land contract 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 land contract is stale, opaque, mispriced, misrecorded, overextended, or applied outside the conditions that made it useful.

## Lenses

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

## Divination

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

**Question:** Who has legitimate authority under Land Contract, and where does that authority stop?

**Guidance:** Name the source, scope, duration, appeal path, and release of authority.

## Game function

Changes what actions are permitted and who may authorize them. Initiative 4.

## Relationships

- **Conforming Loan conflicts with Land Contract.** Conforming Loan conflicts with Land Contract through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Seller Financing is administered through Land Contract.** Seller Financing is administered through Land Contract through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Land Contract depends on Shared-Appreciation Mortgage.** Land Contract depends on Shared-Appreciation Mortgage through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Land Contract is evidenced by Processor.** Land Contract is evidenced by Processor 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 Land Contract through the lineage of Alternative & Non-QM Finance: 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 Land Contract: a cadastral grid overlaid with colored permissions, gates, and invisible boundaries made visible; 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.
- [Comptroller's Handbook — Commercial Real Estate Lending](https://www.occ.gov/publications-and-resources/publications/comptrollers-handbook/files/commercial-real-estate-lending/pub-ch-commercial-real-estate.pdf) — Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; CRE lending, DSCR, debt yield, cap rate, valuation, risk.
