Real property

In English common law, real property, real estate, realty, or immovable property is any subset of land that has been legally defined and the improvements to it have been made by human efforts: buildings, machinery, wells, dams, ponds, mines, canals, roads, etc. Real property and personal property are the two main subunits of property in English common law.

In countries with personal ownership of real property, civil law protects the status of real property in real-estate markets, where estate agents work in the market of buying and selling real estate. Scottish civil law calls real property "heritable property", and in French-based law, it is called immobilier ("immovable property").

Historical background

The word "real" ultimately derives from Latin res ("thing") and was used in Middle English to mean "relating to things, especially real property".

In common law, real property was property that could be protected by some form of real action, in contrast to personal property, where a plaintiff would have to resort to another form of action. As a result of this formalist approach, some things the common law deems to be land would not be classified as such by most modern legal systems, for example an advowson (the right to nominate a priest) was real property. By contrast the rights of a leaseholder originate in personal actions and so the common law originally treated a leasehold as part of personal property.