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“Mortgage” Means “Death Contract”

October 12, 2014
$2.99
Excel Sheet

A mortgage loan is a loan secured by real property through the use of a mortgage note. The word mortgage is a French Law term meaning "death contract", meaning that the pledge ends (dies) when either the obligation is fulfilled or the property is taken through foreclosure.

Similarly to other Central Europeans, most Czechs own the house they live in (over 70%). This is  partly due to the privatization of the housing stock from the beginning of the 1990s, when people were offered the chance to buy out municipal- and state-owned dwellings.

Therefore, only a few of them have a mortgage loan, some 15% of the total at the end of 2013 on the basis of the number of mortgage loans and households. That is roughly in line with other countries in the CEE region, but well below the level seen in the more developed world (with 30-40% households having a mortgage loan).

More details at www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/index/mortgage-loans-as-of-gdp