- published: 25 Mar 2014
- views: 40837
The term commercial property (also called investment or income property) refers to buildings or land intended to generate a profit, either from capital gain or rental income.
Commercial property includes office buildings, industrial property, medical centers, hotels, malls, retail stores, shopping centers, farm land, multifamily housing buildings, warehouses, and garages. In many states, residential property containing more than a certain number of units qualifies as commercial property for borrowing and tax purposes.
Commercial real estate is commonly divided into six categories:
Of these, only the first five are classified as being commercial buildings. Residential Income Property may also be used to mean Multifamily Apartments.
The total value of commercial property in the United States was approximately $11 trillion in 2009, as measured by the CoStar Group and published in the Journal of Real Estate Management.
According to Real Capital Analytics, a New York real estate research firm, more than $160 billion of commercial properties in the U.S. are now in default, foreclosure or bankruptcy. In Europe, approximately half of the €960 billion of debt backed by European commercial real estate is expected to require refinancing in the next three years, according to PropertyMall, a UK based commercial property news provider.
Real estate is "Property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals, or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this; (also) an item of real property; (more generally) buildings or housing in general. Also: the business of real estate; the profession of buying, selling, or renting land, buildings or housing."
It is a legal term used in jurisdictions such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
In the laws of the United States of America, the 'real' in 'real estate' means relating to a thing (res/'rei', thing, from O.Fr. 'reel', from L.L. 'realis' 'actual', from Latin. 'res', 'matter, thing'), as distinguished from a person. Thus the law broadly distinguishes between 'real' property (land and anything affixed to it) and 'personal' property or chattels (everything else, e.g., clothing, furniture, money). The conceptual difference was between 'immovable property', which would transfer title along with the land, and 'movable property', which a person could lawfully take and would retain title to on disposal of the land.
An estate agent is a person or business that arranges the selling, renting or management of properties, and other buildings, in the United Kingdom and Ireland. An agent that specialises in renting is often called a letting or management agent. Estate agents are mainly engaged in the marketing of property available for sale and a solicitor or licensed conveyancer is used to prepare the legal documents. In Scotland, however, many solicitors also act as estate agents, a practice that is rare in England and Wales.
It is customary in the United Kingdom and in Ireland to refer to real estate or real property simply as property.
The estate agent remains the current title for the person responsible for the management of one group of privately owned, all or mostly tenanted, properties under one ownership. Alternative titles are Factor, Steward or Bailiff depending on the era, the region and the extent of the property concerned.
The term originally referred to a person responsible for managing a landed estate, while those engaged in the buying and selling of homes were "House Agents", and those selling land were "Land Agents". However, in the 20th century, "Estate Agent" started to be used as a generic term, perhaps because it was thought to sound more impressive. Estate agent is roughly synonymous in the United States with the term real estate broker.