The legal arrangement for the right to occupy a dwelling is known as the housing tenure. Types of housing tenure include owner occupancy, Tenancy, housing cooperative, condominiums (individually parceled properties in a single building), public housing, and squatting. Variants include timeshares and cohousing.

Residences can be classified by if and how they are connected to neighboring residences and land. Different types of housing tenure can be used for the same physical type. For example, connected residents might be owned by a single entity and leased out, or owned separately with an agreement covering the relationship between units and common areas and concerns.

Major physical categories in North America and Europe include:

• Attached / multi-unit dwellings
  • Apartment ("flat" outside North America) - An individual unit in a multi-unit building. The boundaries of the apartment are generally defined by a perimeter of locked or lockable doors. Often seen in multi-story apartment buildings.
  • Multi-family house - Often seen in multi-story detached buildings, where each floor is a separate apartment or unit.
  • Terraced house (a.k.a. townhouse or rowhouse) - A number of single or multi-unit buildings in a continuous row with shared walls and no intervening space.
  • Condominium - Building or complex, similar to apartments, owned by individuals. Common grounds are owned and shared jointly.
• Semi-detached dwellings
  • Duplex - Two units with one shared wall.
• Single-family detached home
• Portable dwellings
  • Mobile homes - Potentially a full-time residence which can be (might might not in practice be) movable on wheels.
  • Houseboats - A floating home
  • Tents - Usually very temporary, with roof and walls consisting only of fabric-like material.

The size of an apartment or house can be described in square feet or meters. In the United States this includes the area of "living space", excluding the garage and other non-living spaces. The "square meters" figure of a house in Europe reports the area of the walls enclosing the home, and thus includes any attached garage and non-living spaces.

It can also be described more roughly by the number of rooms. A studio apartment has a single bedroom with no living room (possibly a separate kitchen). A one-bedroom apartment has a living or dining room, separate from the bedroom. Two bedroom, three bedroom, and larger units are also common. (A bedroom is defined as a room with a closet for clothes storage.)

See List of house types for a complete listing of housing types and layouts, and house or home for more general information.

Market sector value

According to The Economist, "developed economies'" assets at the end of 2002 was

• Residential property: $48 trillion
• Commercial property: $14 trillion
• Equities: $20 trillion
• Government bonds: $20 trillion
• Corporate bonds: $13 trillion
• Total: $115 trillion

That makes real estate assets 54% and financial assets 46% of total stocks, bonds, and real estate assets. Assets not counted here are bank deposits, insurance "reserve" assets, and human assets; also it is not clear if all debt and equity investments are counted in the categories equities and bonds. For U.S. asset levels see FRB: Z.1 Release-- Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States.

Mortgages in real estate

In recent years, many economists have recognized that the lack of effective real estate laws can be a significant barrier to investment in many developing countries. In most societies, rich or poor, a significant fraction of the total wealth is in the form of land and buildings.

In most advanced economies, the main source of capital used by individuals and small companies to purchase and improve land and buildings is mortgage loans (or other instruments). These are loans for which the real property itself constitutes collateral. Banks are willing to make such loans at favorable rates in large part because, if the borrower does not make payments, the lender can foreclose by filing a court action which allows them take back the property and sell it to get their money back. For investors, profitability can be enhanced by using an off plan or pre-construction strategy to purchase at a lower price which is often the case in the pre-construction phase of development.

But in many developing countries there is no effective means by which a lender could foreclose, so the mortgage loan industry, as such, either does not exist at all or is only available to members of privileged social classes.