CEMA

A CEMA is New York's mortgage-tax-saving refinance structure: rather than discharging the old mortgage and recording a wholly new one — which would incur mortgage recording tax on the full new principal — the existing mortgage is assigned to the new lender and consolidated, extended, and modified into the new loan's terms, with tax due only on genuinely new money.

In the recorded trail, CEMAs read as chains: assignments of the old instrument, then the consolidation agreement carrying the combined economics. For analysis they explain why a property's recorded mortgage history shows instruments surviving across lender changes — the debt's paper lineage is preserved deliberately, because the lineage is the tax savings.