House buying advice/planning for the future

Is there a catch here?

For some reason I don't feel like I would be able to borrow money for a house, build a new one, and bulldoze the old one before the old one was paid for.

That's what I thought.

I could easily leave it there if I had to. What I would more likely do would be move it to the back corner of the property after I was in the new house if I needed to leave it. I assume that wouldn't be an issue like bullfozing the old one?

Or maybe I could roll up what I owed on it into the price of the new house? Pay cash for the old house now and finance the property?

I tried having this discussion with the people at the bank and they weren't clear at all on how to go about doing it.

The issue is the bank doesn't want you to do something that will reduce the value of the old house - if the old house is serving as collateral on the loan.

I don't know if a bank will allow you to essentially only use the land as the security interest. Even if you paid enough down payment to cover the value of the improved property (i.e. the house).

We had a similar thing happen to a family member about a decade ago. She bought a house that had an addition on the back of it - this happened about 15 years ago. Apparently the addition did not have pilings under it. Well, the addition began sinking and essentially ripping it away from the house. It was actually becoming unsafe. She went to the bank and asked about just knocking down the addition. The bank said if she did that, they would call the loan. The bank did offer to finance repairs/renovations to the addition to shore it up, which is what ended up happening.

I did just think of something else, but it's involved. Depending on the location of the house on the property, perhaps the property could be divided into two new legal properties - one the house and immediately surrounding land, and the other with the rest of the land. Buy old house property in cash. Get a land loan for the rest. Bulldoze house. Build new house using construction loan.

of course if you continued to pay the note

while at the same time tearing the house down and building a new one

i doubt the bank would ever know.

However this would mean that you would be building the new one for cash out of you own pocket.

A demolition permit??? I was hoping to just rent a roll off and tear it down and stuff it in there.

What will likely happen is me buying the house, living in it until I'm finished with the new one, and converting the old one into man cave/party house/drunk friends sleeping place/carpentry project.

I wouldn't mind tearing it down though. I thought maybe I could still owe some money on it and roll it into the new house since I would be drastically increasing the property value, but I figured it wasn't that simple.