Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Illinois
When being on a mortgage with someone, what rights do we have to the house?
2 Answers from Attorneys
Being a mortgagor does not give you any rights to the property. You may have rights which arise in some other manner, but the mortgage alone does nothing to give you any interest in the real estate.
Are you the borrower, or the lender? If you are the borrower, hopefully you also are on title to the house; otherwise all you have is the "downside", meaning you have no ownership in the house but you owe the lender obligations such as paying the loan associated with the mortgage, keeping it up, insuring it, and not selling it out from under the lender. If you are the lender, normally your only rights in Illinois are to foreclose the lien and have the house sold off through the foreclosure process if the borrower doesn't do what the borrower is supposed to do (see previous sentence).