99 Fun Facts About Real Estate

Which word for a property agent is a registered trademark in the United States, reserved for one trade body's members?

Realtor was devised in 1916 by Charles Chadbourn of the Minneapolis Real Estate Board for members of the national association, which later registered it; only its members may use the title.

A 1667 treaty left England Manhattan and the Dutch a tiny island prized for which spice?

Nutmeg grew on Run, a speck in today's Indonesia that England had claimed since 1616; the treaty let each side keep what it held, so the Dutch kept Run and England kept the town it had just renamed New York.

Settlers who slipped into Oklahoma's free land before the 1889 land run officially began earned which nickname?

Sooners hid in brush and ravines, then popped up to stake claims as the run began; the insult, taken from the law's 'sooner clause', was later adopted by Oklahomans as a badge of pride.

The standard American fixed-rate mortgage is scheduled to be paid off over how many years?

30 years became the norm only after the New Deal: until the 1930s a typical home loan covered about half the price and fell due within three to five years, ending in a balloon payment.

What is the term for money held by a neutral third party until the conditions of a sale are met?

Escrow first meant a document, not money: the word comes from Old French escroe, a scrap of parchment, the signed deed that a third party held back until the terms were met.

The Federal National Mortgage Association, a creation of Roosevelt's New Deal, is better known by which nickname?

Fannie Mae was set up by Congress in 1938 to buy home loans from lenders so that they could lend again; in 1968 it was taken off the federal budget and became wholly shareholder-owned.

What is the full name of the mortgage company nicknamed Freddie Mac?

Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation was chartered by Congress in 1970; it lends to no home buyer directly, instead buying mortgages from lenders so that they have money to lend again.

Which agency, created in 1934, insures home loans made by private lenders?

The Federal Housing Administration pays the lender if a borrower defaults, so banks could risk smaller down payments and longer terms; it runs mainly on the insurance premiums borrowers pay.

Which Wall Street investment bank filed the largest bankruptcy in US history in September 2008?

Lehman Brothers went under with more than $600 billion in assets after rescue talks failed; six months earlier the Federal Reserve had helped JPMorgan Chase buy the stricken Bear Stearns instead.

Which kind of mortgage gave its name to the 2007-2010 crisis that followed America's housing boom?

Subprime loans went to borrowers with weak credit; once house prices peaked they could no longer refinance or sell their way out, and in April 2007 the big subprime lender New Century went bankrupt.

Which 2005 bestseller argued that estate agents sell their own homes for more than they get for their clients?

Freakonomics drew on its economist co-author's study of home sales: agents' own houses stayed on the market about ten days longer and fetched nearly 4 per cent more, since a quick sale costs an agent little commission.

What does the abbreviation MLS stand for in real estate?

Multiple listing service began in the late 1800s, when brokers met at their local associations to swap properties on one principle: help me sell my inventory and I'll help you sell yours.

In medieval England an acre was reckoned as the land one plough team of which animals could work in a day?

Oxen set the acre's shape as well as its size: a furlong, literally a 'furrow long', was the length of one ploughed furrow, and an acre was a strip one furlong by one chain, 43,560 square feet.

Which Australian colony introduced the Torrens system of land registration in 1858, since copied around the world?

South Australia's Robert Torrens was a customs collector, not a lawyer: his Act let land change hands by an entry in a public register instead of a bundle of old deeds, and it passed over fierce opposition from the legal profession.

Which form of home ownership reached the mainland US from Puerto Rico in the 1960s?

Condominium ownership was barely known on the mainland until a 1961 federal law let Washington insure mortgages on individual flats; states then hurried to pass the condo laws the scheme required.

Monopoly is derived from a 1903 creation by Lizzie Magie called what?

The Landlord's Game came with two sets of rules, one rewarding everyone when wealth was created and one crowning a monopolist; Parker Brothers reportedly paid Magie $500 for the patent and no royalties.

The streets on the original Monopoly board are named after locations in which New Jersey resort?

Atlantic City's street names were added by a circle of local Quakers playing a homemade version of the game, and it was their board that Charles Darrow copied and sold to Parker Brothers as his own.

In World War II, British intelligence smuggled what to Allied prisoners inside Monopoly sets?

Escape maps were printed on silk, which does not rustle, tear or dissolve when wet, by Monopoly's British maker Waddingtons; a compass and small files went into hollows cut in the board.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 cost the United States how much?

$15 million was half as much again as the envoys had been cleared to spend on New Orleans and territory in Florida, yet it bought 828,000 square miles and roughly doubled the size of the country.

Which two American envoys negotiated the Louisiana Purchase in Paris?

James Monroe and Robert Livingston had been sent to buy New Orleans and territory in Florida; when Napoleon, his army in the Caribbean decimated by yellow fever, offered all of Louisiana, they went beyond their instructions and said yes.

The United States bought a vast northern territory from Russia in 1867 for what sum?

$7.2 million was a price Russia was glad to take: it lacked the money to hold the territory, had lost interest after defeat in the Crimean War, and hoped an American presence would check its rival Britain.

A 1626 Dutch letter records the purchase of Manhattan Island from its Native inhabitants for how much?

60 guilders gets a single line in Pieter Schaghen's letter, between news of children born in the colony and a ship's cargo list headed by 7,246 beaver skins; it is the earliest record of the deal.

The Homestead Act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 offered settlers how much federal land?

160 acres became a settler's own after five years of living on and farming the plot, for a small filing fee; some 270 million acres, a tenth of the country, passed into private hands this way.

In which state did homesteading run until 1986, a decade after it ended in the rest of the US?

Alaska's Ken Deardorff, a Vietnam veteran from California, proved up his claim on the remote Stony River in 1979 but waited until May 1988 for his title, the last ever issued to an American homesteader.

Between 1908 and 1940 which retailer sold entire houses as mail-order kits?

Sears shipped more than 70,000 of its Modern Homes: each kit arrived in a railway boxcar with pre-cut lumber and an instruction book, and the firm promised that a novice could finish the house in under 90 days.

Levittown, New York, the first mass-produced American suburb, was built between 1947 and 1951 for whom?

Returning World War II veterans could buy with no money down; Levitt's crews moved from house to house, each doing one of 26 set tasks, and at the peak they finished a home every 16 minutes.

Which 1944 law gave ex-servicemen government-backed home loans?

The GI Bill was drafted by the American Legion and signed in June 1944, with the war still being fought; as well as backing mortgages it sent millions of former servicemen to college and job training.

Clause 25 of the original Levittown lease was a restrictive covenant that did what?

Clause 25 barred non-white residents in bold capitals: a house could not be 'used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race', and the suburb stayed entirely white for decades.

What is the 1930s practice of marking minority neighbourhoods on maps as too risky for mortgages?

Redlining was mapped by the government itself: New Deal agencies colour-coded American cities by lending risk and marked the districts judged riskiest, nearly every Black neighbourhood among them, in red; a 1968 law banned it.

The Fair Housing Act was signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1968 during riots that followed whose assassination?

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on 4 April 1968 while the bill sat stalled in a hostile House committee; within a week the House had passed it, and Johnson signed it on 11 April.

By Eurostat's 2023 figures, which was the only EU country where more people rented their home than owned it?

Germany stood alone with 52 per cent of its people renting, while 96 per cent of Romanians lived in an owned home; German law caps rent rises and protects tenants, and buyers get no tax relief on mortgage interest.

Zillow was founded in 2006 by former executives of which company?

Microsoft was where Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink had built the travel site Expedia; Zillow applied the same idea to housing, putting data once held by agents, such as an estimate of any home's value, in public hands.

Which rival listings site did Zillow take over in 2015, in a deal agreed the previous summer?

Trulia was announced as a $3.5 billion all-stock purchase in July 2014; when the deal closed in February 2015 it was put at about $2.5 billion, and the merged company became Zillow Group.

RE/MAX, founded in Denver in 1973, is known for a logo featuring what?

A hot air balloon first flew the RE/MAX colours at Albuquerque's balloon fiesta in 1978, a local franchise owner's idea; in 1998 founder Dave Liniger planned to circle the globe in one, but the flight was called off.

Airbnb's name is short for what?

Airbed and Breakfast hosted its first three guests on air mattresses in the founders' own flat in October 2007, to help pay the rent; when the site formally launched five months later it took just two bookings.

Which Shark Tank investor built a New York brokerage on a borrowed $1,000 and sold it for $66 million?

Barbara Corcoran says she had no idea what the firm was worth: by her account she turned down an offer of about $20 million and held out for $66 million because 66 was her lucky number.

On TV's Property Brothers, Drew Scott is the estate agent who finds the houses: what is his twin Jonathan's trade?

Licensed contractor Jonathan does the renovating, though his first ambition was to be a stage illusionist while Drew tried acting; property was meant only to pay the bills.

The largest privately owned house in the United States, with 250 rooms, is which Gilded Age estate?

Biltmore, built for George Vanderbilt between 1889 and 1895, was opened to paying visitors by his daughter in 1930 to earn its keep and to draw tourists to a region hit by the Depression.

Hearst Castle in San Simeon was designed by which pioneering architect?

Julia Morgan, the first woman licensed as an architect in California, took the job in 1919 as a country house on the Hearst family ranch; it grew into a castle that kept her busy for 28 years.

The British monarch's London palace began life in the early 1700s as a townhouse built for which nobleman?

The Duke of Buckingham's townhouse was bought by George III as a private home for Queen Charlotte; no sovereign actually lived in the enlarged palace until Victoria moved in, in 1837.

Feng shui, the Chinese practice of arranging buildings to channel qi, translates literally as what?

Wind-water served graves as well as homes: the art picked the most auspicious site for a tomb as readily as for a house, long before it became a byword for arranging furniture.

The word 'mortgage' comes from two Old French words that literally mean what?

Dead pledge, from mort and gage: by one old account the deal 'dies' either way, when the loan is paid off or when the borrower fails and forfeits the property.

Which federal programme pays part of the rent for low-income American tenants living in privately owned homes?

Section 8 tenants usually pay about 30 per cent of their income in rent and a voucher covers the rest; Congress created it in 1974 after studies found the poor's worst housing problem was no longer slums but the cost of rent.

The ten-storey Home Insurance Building of 1885, widely called the world's first skyscraper, stood in which city?

Chicago's Home Insurance Building rose only 138 feet, but a metal frame carried the weight that thick walls once had to, a method builders came to call the Chicago skeleton; it was pulled down in 1931.

Who installed the first passenger safety elevator in 1857, at the E. V. Haughwout store in New York?

Elisha Otis had won the public over in 1854 at New York's Crystal Palace exhibition: standing on a raised platform, he ordered the rope cut, the brake caught, and he called out 'All safe, gentlemen, all safe.'

Where did Britain's first known building society, formed in 1775, meet?

A public house, Birmingham's Golden Cross Inn, was home to Richard Ketley's society: members paid in each month to build one another's houses, and such early societies wound themselves up once every member was housed.

Which power, traced to the 17th-century jurist Hugo Grotius, lets a government take private property for public use with compensation?

Eminent domain renders Grotius's Latin dominium eminens, 'supreme ownership'; under the Fifth Amendment an American government may use it only if it pays the owner 'just compensation'.

Which 2005 Supreme Court ruling let a city take homes to make way for private development?

Kelo v. New London was decided 5–4; in dissent Sandra Day O'Connor warned that nothing now stopped a state 'replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall'.

Some structural steel in the Burj Khalifa was salvaged from which demolished building?

Berlin's Palace of the Republic, the East German parliament and dance hall, was cut up for scrap in 2008; its girders were melted down and sold on, some for the tower then called Burj Dubai and some for Volkswagen engines.

Sold in 1968 to an American entrepreneur, London Bridge was rebuilt beside a desert lake in which US state?

Arizona got the bridge when its buyer shipped the granite facing to Lake Havasu City, the planned community he had founded. He installed it to attract tourists and retirement home buyers to his properties.

Con artist Victor Lustig posed as a French official in 1925 to sell which Paris landmark to scrap dealers?

The Eiffel Tower's upkeep was in the news, so Lustig told scrap dealers the French government wanted it sold quietly to avoid a public outcry. He is remembered as the man who sold it twice.

Which company used dummy corporations in the 1960s to quietly buy 43 square miles of central Florida?

Disney hid behind tongue-in-cheek names such as the Ayefour Corporation to avoid a burst of land speculation. Some of the names are memorialized on windows above Main Street, U.S.A. in the Magic Kingdom.

In 1898 Britain signed a 99-year lease with Qing China for the New Territories of which colony?

Hong Kong went back to China in 1997 because that lease ran out. The island itself and Kowloon had been ceded outright in earlier years, but all three areas were handed over together.

The United States sends a $4,085 lease cheque every year, almost never cashed, for which overseas naval base?

Guantanamo Bay has been leased from Cuba since 1903 under an agreement with no fixed expiry date. Only one payment has been accepted since the Cuban Revolution, which Fidel Castro put down to confusion in 1959.

Which single-storey house type takes its name from a word meaning a house in the Bengal style?

Bungalow comes from the word Bangla. Under the British Raj, the mail used dak bungalows of this kind in that part of India.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison paid $300 million in 2012 for 98 percent of which Hawaiian island?

Lanai is known as the Pineapple Island, because a fruit company's president bought it in the 1920s and made much of it the world's largest pineapple plantation. Ellison's share came from the firm Castle & Cooke.

Which fast-food giant's growth rested on Harry Sonneborn's idea of owning the land and leasing it to franchisees?

McDonald's made Sonneborn its first president in 1959. The former Tastee-Freez executive had taken the plan to Ray Kroc and ran the deals through a specially formed property corporation.

Which Memphis mansion, bought for $102,500 in 1957, has been open to the public as a house museum since 1982?

Graceland was Elvis Presley's home. A year before buying it he had paid $40,000 for a house on Audubon Drive in the same city for himself and his family.

In Japan's late-1980s land bubble, the emperor's Tokyo compound was valued above every property in which US state?

California's entire real estate was estimated to be worth less than the 1.15 square kilometres of the imperial grounds in central Tokyo. The bubble's bursting led into what many call Japan's Lost Decade.

Which property right, best typified by a right of way, lets someone use land that another person owns?

An easement gives no right to possess the land, only to use or enter onto it. A floating easement has no fixed location or route at all.

Which doctrine, colloquially called squatter's rights, can make an occupier the legal owner of land after years of use?

Adverse possession rests on continuous occupation without the legal owner's permission. Its nickname is tied to settlers who occupied land they had no legal right to during the westward expansion in North America.

Which legal claim on a property, named from the Latin for 'to bind', secures payment of a debt?

A lien is a security interest granted over property until an obligation is met. Tax authorities and homeowner associations can each place one on a house for unpaid dues.

Which type of deed, often used for gifts within a family, passes only whatever interest the grantor happens to hold?

Quitclaim deeds make no promise that the grantor owns anything. A famous early example came in 1189, when Richard I gave up his claims on Scotland in the Quitclaim of Canterbury.

What is the amplest form of land ownership in common law, still subject to taxation and compulsory purchase?

Fee simple is as close to outright ownership as common law comes. The word fee is a reduced form of fief, the feudal holding for which a tenant owed his overlord duties such as fighting as a knight.

Which doctrine, once a feudal lord's right, hands the state the land of someone who dies without heirs?

Escheat takes its name from the Latin for 'fall away', by way of medieval French. In the United Kingdom such land goes to the Crown.

Which kind of land-use regulation did New York adopt citywide in 1916, the first American city to do so?

Zoning arrived with limits on how much bulk a building could carry at each height. The stepped, setback skyscraper built to satisfy them became a style that spread to other cities by the end of the 1920s.

In which legal process, which ends a borrower's right of redemption, does a lender force the sale of a home?

Foreclosure lets the lender recover the loan balance from the sale. In the United States it runs either through the courts or, where the loan papers include a power of sale clause, without a judge.

Which form of co-ownership carries a right of survivorship, so a late owner's share passes to the other owners?

Joint tenancy passes the share to the survivors by operation of law, avoiding probate, which is why spouses often choose it. A tenant in common's share goes to heirs instead.

Which Latin maxim, the traditional rule in house sales, puts the risk of hidden defects on the purchaser?

Caveat emptor is Latin for 'Let the buyer beware'. In the United States the rule gives way mainly when a builder sells new housing, which carries an implied warranty of fitness.

Chip and Joanna Gaines renovated houses on HGTV's Fixer Upper in and around which Texas city?

Waco saw tourism and economic development rise because of the show. The Gaineses went on to oversee a channel of their own, Magnolia Network, which relaunched the series.

Which Netflix reality series follows the agents of the Oppenheim Group, a high-end brokerage in Los Angeles?

Selling Sunset spawned a franchise: Selling the OC covers the same firm's Newport Beach branch, while Selling Tampa follows a different brokerage altogether.

Which David Mamet play about cut-throat property salesmen won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and became a 1992 film?

Glengarry Glen Ross is named after two developments the characters keep mentioning, Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms. Mamet wrote an extended screenplay for the film version himself.

Which Michael Lewis book about investors who bet against the American housing bubble became a 2015 film?

The Big Short spent 28 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The people it follows believed the bubble would burst and ended up profiting from the 2008 financial crisis.

In which Frank Capra film does George Bailey run a Building and Loan that the wealthy Mr. Potter wants closed?

It's a Wonderful Life has George take over the family firm when his father dies, giving up his plans to travel. Under him it builds Bailey Park, a housing development to compete with Potter's slums.

Ty Burrell played Phil Dunphy, a relentlessly confident estate agent, in which long-running ABC sitcom?

Modern Family aired for 11 seasons, from 2009 to 2020. Phil, married to Claire and father of three, also has a severe fear of clowns.

Which American property brokerage was formed in San Francisco in the months after the 1906 earthquake and fires?

Coldwell Banker is not a bank: the second half of its name is that of a former managing partner. It began in August 1906 as Tucker, Lynch and Coldwell.

Which 1986 comedy stars Tom Hanks and Shelley Long as a couple whose bargain mansion falls apart around them?

The Money Pit has its hero pay just $200,000 in a distress sale for a mansion said to be worth a million. The exterior was a rundown house on Long Island built in 1898.

Which HGTV series, on air since 1999, has buyers choose between three properties with a local agent's help?

House Hunters films an average episode in three days, at a small fraction of the cost of an hour of TV drama. It has produced well over 2,000 episodes.

In which 1982 horror film does a family learn its suburban housing development was built over a former cemetery?

Poltergeist turns on a developer's shortcut: the father hears from his boss that the graves were simply moved nearby. The house ends by imploding in front of the stunned neighbours.

Which 1853 land deal with Mexico was struck so the United States could build a southern transcontinental railroad?

The Gadsden Purchase takes its name from the American minister to Mexico who signed the first draft with President Santa Anna. The Southern Pacific completed the line across the new territory in the early 1880s.

Which great survey of English landholdings was compiled at the behest of William the Conqueror in the 1080s?

Domesday Book recorded the annual value of every piece of landed property to its lord. A 12th-century writer said it was so called because its decisions were as unalterable as those of the Last Judgment.

Which American economist argued in Progress and Poverty (1879) for a single tax on land values?

Henry George held that such a tax would create a more productive and just society. The book, his most famous work, sold millions of copies worldwide.

Which 1978 ballot measure capped property tax at 1 percent of assessed value and limited yearly rises in that value?

Proposition 13 ties a property's assessed value to the date it was acquired rather than to the market. That gives long-time owners a reason to hold on to their homes instead of downsizing.

Which four-letter acronym names the property investment vehicle created by a law Dwight Eisenhower signed in 1960?

REIT stands for real estate investment trust. The law behind it is sometimes called the Cigar Excise Tax Extension of 1960, and the first ones consisted primarily of mortgage companies.

Which Manhattan complex changed hands in 1989 when Japan's Mitsubishi Estate bought the group that owned it?

Rockefeller Center's owning group filed for bankruptcy protection in May 1995, six years after the Japanese takeover, having missed several mortgage payments.

In Stambovsky v. Ackley, a 1991 case taught in American law schools, a New York court ruled a Nyack house legally what?

Haunted was the court's word, because the owner had previously advertised the place as having ghosts, and that let a later purchaser sue to undo the deal. Lawyers know it as the Ghostbusters ruling.

Mukesh Ambani's family residence Antilia, a 27-storey building with a 168-car garage, stands in which Indian city?

Mumbai's Billionaires' Row is the address. Antilia also has nine high-speed lifts, a 50-seat theatre and a snow room that produces snowflakes from its walls.

Which Danish-American journalist photographed New York's slums for the 1890 book How the Other Half Lives?

Jacob Riis worked at night, which let him photograph the dark streets and crowded tenements around Mulberry Street. He later backed the building of model tenements in the city.

Which prehistoric monument did Cecil Chubb buy on a whim at a 1915 auction for £6,600, later giving it to Britain?

Stonehenge was Lot 15 in a sale of the surrounding estate. Chubb, born four miles away, is said to have bid because he felt a local man should own it.

Which Arctic island did the United States secretly offer to buy in 1946 for $100 million in gold bullion?

Greenland was judged vital to American defence, yet a military planning committee called it completely worthless to Denmark, which turned the offer down.

Which word did the sociologist Ruth Glass coin for richer newcomers squeezing the poor out of parts of London?

Gentrification comes from gentry, the English class of people of gentle birth. Glass, a German-born sociologist, had already founded the Centre for Urban Studies at University College London.

The 'real' in real estate traces back through medieval law to the Latin word res, which means what?

Thing is the sense: lawyers used 'real' for land and other immovable property, as distinct from personal belongings. The exact phrase real estate is recorded from the 1660s.

Which Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania was built as a weekend retreat for a Pittsburgh department store owner?

Fallingwater sits partly over a waterfall on the Bear Run stream. The Kaufmanns had run a summer retreat there for their store's employees, and bought the site when the staff stopped using it.

Which acronym, in print since 1979, labels residents who fight new building planned close to their own homes?

NIMBY, short for 'not in my back yard', carries the charge that such residents would tolerate the project if it were built farther away. The opposite movement calls itself YIMBY.

Which English system, used in the Thirteen Colonies, describes a plot of land by distances, directions and landmarks?

Metes and bounds can fail when a landmark vanishes: a description might cite a large oak tree that later disappears, or is confused with a different tree that grew afterwards.

Which British term describes a seller accepting an offer on a house, then taking a higher one from someone else?

Gazumping is a rarity in Scotland, thanks to Scots law and practice. It became commonplace in England and Wales in the late 1980s, because an accepted offer there is not legally binding.

Which German-born fur trader became America's first multi-millionaire after putting his profits into Manhattan land?

John Jacob Astor got out of the fur trade in 1830, as European tastes in beaver hats changed, and diversified into New York City real estate. He had also made money exporting opium to China.

Which spice names the token rent charged so that an otherwise rent-free lease counts as a binding contract?

Peppercorn rent exists because a contract needs each side to give something, however small. It is sometimes set in whimsical physical goods rather than currency.

The maze-like San Jose mansion that a widowed heiress kept rebuilding takes its name from which firearms maker?

Winchester rifles paid for it: Sarah Winchester, the magnate's widow, was known to rebuild and abandon work that displeased her. An 1897 newspaper reported one tower torn down and rebuilt 16 times.