Real Estate Investing Information Blog

At ordinary law, an estate is the totality of the lawful rights, interests, entitlements and obligations attaching to property. In the situation of wills and probate, it refers to the totality of the property which the deceased owned or in which a few interest was held.

An estate in land may be any fixed out portion of the allodial or fee simple, which is the most absolute ownership that one can have of property in the common law system. An estate can be an estate for years, an estate at will, a life estate, an estate pure auteur vie (a life concentration for the life of another person) or a fee end estate (to the heirs of one's body) or several more limited kind of heir (e.g. to heirs male of one's body).

Fee simple estates may be any fee simple absolute or defensible (i.e. subject to future conditions) like fee easy determinable and fee simple subject to condition subsequent; this is the composite system of future interests (q.v.) which allows concepts of trusts and estates to elide into actuarial science through the use of life contingencies.

Estate in land can also be divided into estates of legacy and other estates that are not of legacy. The fee easy estate and the fee tail estate are estates of inheritance; they pass to the owner's heirs by process of law, either without restrictions (in the case of fee simple), or with limitations (in the case of fee tail). The estate for years and the life estate are estates not of inheritance; the owner owns nil after the term of years has passed, and cannot pass on anything to his or her heirs.

The phrase 'estate' is also used to refer to the whole of a person's property or of an exacting kind of property (such as 'real estate' (meaning land and buildings) or 'personal estate' (meaning goods and chattels).

In the situation of probate, it is all the property that passes under a will or the law of intestacy, which has to be administered by the executors or administrators.

Under the law of insolvency in the United States, the "estate" is defined by the Bankruptcy Code as all assets or property of any kind belonging to the debtor who is available for distribution to creditors. The bankruptcy estate is defined at 11 U.S.C. § 541. In several cases, the person with legal liability for the estate is the trustee. The law of England, while governed by British Acts of Parliament, is alike in this respect.