Check the math first: $15,000 to your relative does not pay off a $30,000 mortgage, and that gap is the first thing to resolve. If they owe roughly $30,000 and are asking you for $15,000 to take the home, they most likely need about $45,000 total, the loan payoff plus the cash they want in hand. Get that clarified before anything else moves. On the 2-1 lock: what they are almost certainly describing is a 2-1 temporary buydown, a financing feature where the payment is calculated at a rate 2 percentage points below the note rate in year one and 1 point below in year two, then reverts to the full note rate for the rest of the term. The note rate itself never changes; upfront buydown funds subsidize those early payments. A buydown belongs to a loan and has nothing to do with transferring title, so make sure two different concepts are not getting tangled in this conversation. The bigger advice: do not run this informally, even inside the family. Talk to a local real estate agent about how the transaction should be structured, get an inspection so you know the property's true condition, and verify the real value and the exact loan payoff before any money changes hands. That sanity-check conversation generally costs nothing, and doing the paperwork properly protects you and your relative both. Family deals go wrong the same ways arm's-length deals do.