What is Property Law

Property law is an area of law which governs the different types of real property (Wohnungen) and personal property ownership within the common law system. In order to understand the concepts and ideas behind property law, it would be important that you first understand what real property and personal property are.

Real property refers to the land and the improvements which are the result of human efforts. This would include machinery, buildings, the acquisition of different property rights and others. Real property is also referred to as real estate (privatimmobilien.de) , realty or immovable property. In countries that allow the personal ownership of real property, the civil law protects the realty markets while realtors work in selling real estate in the market.

Real property can be indentified through having a verifiable and a legal property description of a claim to a piece of property. According to property law, there are different interests or estates in real property. This would include fee simple, conditional fee simple, fee tail, life estate and leasehold.

On the other hand, personal property is private property which is moveable. In common law systems, personal property could also be referred to as personalty or chattels. In civil law systems, it is often referred to as movables or movable property, meaning any property which can be moved from a location to another.

Personal property is classified to be either tangible personal property or intangible personal property. Tangible personal property would be a piece of property which can generally be moved, touched and felt such as one which is not attached on land or to real property. This generally includes items like clothing, furniture, jewelry, writings, art and household goods. There could be some cases where there could be formal title documents showing the ownership and the transfer rights after the death of the owner. However, in most cases, tangible personal property would not actually have a “title” under the owner’s name and is instead presumed to be the property that he or she possessed at the time of death.

Intangible personal property or “intangibles” would be personal property which cannot actually be touched, felt and moved. Instead, it represents something which is of value like negotiable instruments, service, securities and other intangible assets.

Some of the legal issues which can be addressed by the concepts of property law would include mortgages, property taxes, tax benefits, transfer of ownership and insurance policies.