History Of Real Estate

According to the Oxford Dictionary, real state means ‘Property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals, or water.’ This is one of the legal terms that are used in the jurisdiction of the countries such as USA, UK, Canada and Australia. According to the American laws, ‘real’ in the word ‘real estate’ refers to ‘something tangible. Thus the laws broadly distinguish between real property and the personal property. Thereis a conceptual difference between immovable property and movable property. In Immovable property title can be transferred along with the land while movingcan be lawfully taken and the title retained until the disposal of the land. One of the oldest credentialsthatused the term ‘real estate’,in the historical records, is 1605. The use of this term shows the feudal customs of that time and some of the relating laws that were introduced by ‘William the Conqueror’ in 1066.

Some people also believe that the world ‘real’ in the term ‘real estate’ is derived from the Latin word that means ‘king’. In the feudal system, kingused to be the owner of the land and all the people living in the jurisdiction of the land used to pay some kind of rent to the king directly or indirectly. The rent was paid in terms of cash, goods and services. The property taxthat we pay to the state also reflects the historic norms of ancient people. Some of the people have argued against this notion and have countered by presenting the evidence that meaning of real in the early time of the English meant ‘of, relating to’ or some ‘characteristic of the monarch, wealth or dignity relating to the monarch’. If we go deep into the meaning of the real estate by looking into the earliest meaning of ‘real’ in English, we come to know that it meant ‘Having an objective existence, physicaland substantially’. Thus our notion of the real estate defined in the first paragraph of the article in which real meant ‘relating to a thing as distinguished from a person’ holds valid.

However the relation of the terms defined above to extract the real meaning of ‘real estate’, doesn’t guarantee that all the above statements,are correct. For example it is pertinent to note that England and Wales became ‘real estate’ in the ‘royal’ sense only after ‘Norman Conquest’. One of the books ‘Domesday Book’ presents some evidence that several land holdings in England and Wales remained in the possession of the people, who were not the kings. They were known as allodial land. Allodial lands two main classes are clearly distinguishable as inferred from the book Domesday, Act of Supremacy 1534’s passage and enforcement and several laws in the Wales Acts from 1535 to 1542 promulgated by ‘Henry VII of England’ and also by the history of ‘Probate’ in England. The word ‘real estate’ became an official English expression and the law ‘law of real estate’ became the official real estate law of England and Wales.