Construction Lien

When the cement doesn't settle right and your new building tilts ever-so-slightly to the East.

Wait...wrong spelling of "lean."

This "lien" has to do with financial claims. If you have a lien on your house, it means that you owe someone money and they have put a claim on your house as a way of getting paid. If you don't come up with cash, they might be able to get a court to order that your house be sold in order to pay the debt. There are lots of other kinds of liens. Liens on assets. Liens on your paycheck. Etc.

A construction lien is another one of these specific situations. In this case, the claim has been made by the construction company that did work on a property.

Say you pay a company to build you a luxury hotel with your name on it. Then you decide to stiff them on the payment; after the building is finished, you stop paying your bills. After a series of increasingly acrimonious phone calls, the lawyers get involved. Eventually, the construction company gets a lien put on the hotel...they can use that as leverage to get your to pay the bill. That's a construction lien.