The vast majority of home owners in this modern day and age don’t have the funds required to buy the house outright. Instead, they usually need to pay a down payment and then slowly pay the rest of the house off through a mortgage, and until the mortgage is paid off there is a pretty good chance that the house would legally be considered the property of the bank that gave you the home loan. This can change a lot of the plans that you might have made with respect to how you will have managed your residential dwelling.
This is because of the fact that your house being owned by the bank can severely limit your ability to hire home remodelers. The truth of the situation is that the bank has taken a risk by loaning you money to allow you to buy a home, and it would therefore prevent you from making any changes to it that might leave the property value lower than it initially was. Hence, suffice it to say that you can’t tear down a house if it’s on mortgage.
However, once you pay the mortgage off, the fact of the matter is that there will no longer be anything stopping you from tearing it down. You should think about this if you are about to buy a fixer upper, because if you buy it on a mortgage you can’t upgrade it in the way that you had preferred. That said, fixer uppers and old homes are usually so cheap that they cost about as much as a down payment for a new home so you can buy them without any trouble.