Native American Home Loans: What You Need To Know

Jun 27, 2024

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Owning a home gives you a place that’s your own space within a broader community. If you’re someone indigenous to the U.S., you may have wondered about getting a home yourself, whether on tribal land or otherwise. We’ll go over Native American home loans, other mortgage options and important land considerations.

How Is Land Held In Your Tribe?

The first question to answer is how land ownership works if you’re living in a tribal community. This impacts the type of mortgage options that may be available to you. We’ll discuss three primary ways land is handled within tribal communities. If you’re living outside of a reservation, you may choose to skip ahead to the next section.

Reservation land has its own benefits in that it may be subject to certain tax exemptions. Speak with a tax advisor about your individual situation. At the same time, there are considerations you should be aware of if you’re trying to buy or refinance a home located in a tribal community.

Fee Simple

You’ll have the most mortgage options available to you if your property is held in fee simple. Owning a home in fee simple is a fancy way of saying that you own the home and the land attached to it with no restriction. Rocket Mortgage® and many other lenders offer a full range of home loan options for fee simple-owned properties located on Native American reservations.

Leasehold

Another common way to hold land within a Native American reservation is in a leasehold. Leaseholds involve a long-term rental of the land on which your home sits from your tribe or other owner of the land – typically several decades.

It’s possible to get a mortgage on property held in a leasehold, but Rocket Mortgage doesn’t offer mortgage financing on these properties at this time. The legal work around leaseholds and other associated land rights in Native American reservations is handled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). This is due to tribal land being subject to agreements between individual tribes and the federal government.

Trust Land

It’s common for tribal land to be held in trust by the federal government or an individual tribe for the benefit of the individual owners of the stake in that trust. In other words, what you own under this arrangement is not the land itself, but the stake in the trust associated with that land.

This works similarly to leasehold land in that the property rights are handled by the BIA. Your lender has to work with the BIA in addition to qualifying you. Rocket Mortgage doesn’t offer loans on properties held in these types of trusts at this time.

See What You Qualify For