The Louisiana Purchase worked out to about 4 cents an acre
In 1803 the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from France for fifteen million dollars, roughly 4 cents for each acre. It ranks among the largest early property deals ever made and opened the way west. The word realtor, by contrast, did not exist until 1916.
Real estate means land together with what is fixed to it or part of it: buildings, growing crops, minerals, water and even wild animals. In legal usage real refers to land, and estate to the interest a person holds in it. Anything that can be carried off, such as cars, boats, furniture, jewellery or a farm's livestock and rolling stock, counts instead as personal property. Ownership and use can differ; a company may own an apartment block that people live in.
The ideas underneath are old. The natural right to own property draws on Roman law and Greek philosophy, and Emerich de Vattel's 1758 treatise The Law of Nations helped shape the modern notion of private property. Professional appraisal grew out of 16th-century England, where clearing and preparing farmland demanded careful surveys; Britain kept the word surveying while North Americans came to say appraising. The oldest brokerage firm started in Chicago in 1855 as L. D. Olmsted and Co., now Baird and Warner, and the national realtors' association was founded in the same city in 1908.
American housing finance took shape in crisis. After the 1929 crash, property values fell by half over four years. Two laws, a 1933 banking act and the 1934 National Housing Act, brought in mortgage insurance, and in 1938 Fannie Mae was created as a secondary market for mortgages, freeing lenders to fund new homes. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 targeted discrimination against African Americans in renting, buying and financing homes. Listings moved online in 1999, and by 2021 about 65 percent of American homes were occupied by their owners.
Property also serves as a store of wealth. Investors rent units out or flip them, reselling quickly after a price rise or renovation, and some luxury flats in London and New York have sat empty as safe deposits, occasionally for laundered money. Buildings carry a heavy environmental cost as well: the International Energy Agency attributed 39 percent of global emissions in 2019 to real estate, 11 percent of that from making construction materials.
Source: Real estate
