Real Estate Investing Information Blog

Real property is a lawful term encompassing real estate and ownership interests in real estate (fixed property). It is a type of property differentiated from individual property. Real property is not immediately the ownership of property and buildings - it includes many official relationships between owners of immovable property(real estate) that are only conceptual such as the easement, where a adjacent property may have some right on your property, right-of-way, or the right to pass over a property, and spiritual heridiments such as profit a Pender. Real property can also be held in different ways. In several jurisdictions real property is held totally, in England it may still be measured to be carved out of Crown's ownership of every property in the realm. Such distinctions are significant in terms of the law of escheat or when property reverts to the state because it lacks an owner or has been discarded.

A significant area of real immovable property is the definitions of estates in land. These are various interests that may boundary the ownership rights one has over the land. The most general and perhaps most absolute type of estate is the fee simple which signifies that the owner has the right to arrange of the property as she/he sees fit. Other estates comprise the life estate where the owner's rights to the property cease at their loss and fee tail estates where the property at the time of death passes to the heirs of the body (i.e. children, grandchildren, descendants) of the owner of the estate before he died.

Estates may also be detained jointly as joint tenants with rights of survivorship or as tenants in general. The distinction in these two types of joint ownership of an estate in land is essentially the inheritability of the estate. In combined tenancy the surviving tenant become the single owner (or owners) of the estate. Nothing passes to the heirs of the deceased tenant. In several jurisdictions the magic words "with right of survivorship" must be used or the occupancy will assumed to be tenants in general. Tenants in general will have a heritable portion of the estate in quantity to their ownership interest which is presumed to be equal between tenants unless otherwise stated in the transfer deed. There are additional types of estates in land that are used to stop the alienation of land. Normally these are called prospect interests, an example being the rule beside perpetuities.

Real property may not only be owned it may be leased in which the control of the property is given to the tenant for an incomplete period of time. Such leases are also called estates such as an estate for years, an episodic tenancy or an estate at will. Real property may also be owned together through the machine of the condominium or cooperative.