Real Estate Trivia
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49 free Real Estate trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free real estate trivia questions with answers. This real estate trivia quiz is for agents, brokers, office trivia nights and anyone who has ever refreshed a Zillow listing. It covers the language of the business (escrow, MLS, amortisation, the acre), the institutions (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA and the trademark on "Realtor"), the famous deals (Manhattan for 60 guilders, Louisiana for $15 million, Alaska for two cents an acre), the history of American housing from the Homestead Act and Sears kit homes to Levittown, redlining and the Fair Housing Act, and the modern industry from RE/MAX's balloon to Airbnb and the 2008 crash. There are a few famous houses too, and a round on Monopoly. Questions run from easy ones any homeowner can answer to details that will stump a veteran broker. Difficulty is marked on every question, so it works as a warm-up for a sales meeting or a real estate class. Every answer has been checked against a Wikipedia article on the topic and each question shows its citation.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word for a property agent is a registered trademark in the United States, reserved for one trade body's members?
Realtor
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.
Q 02A 1667 treaty left England Manhattan and the Dutch a tiny island prized for which spice?
Nutmeg
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.
Q 03Settlers who slipped into Oklahoma's free land before the 1889 land run officially began earned which nickname?
Sooners
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.
Q 04The standard American fixed-rate mortgage is scheduled to be paid off over how many years?
30
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.
Q 05What is the term for money held by a neutral third party until the conditions of a sale are met?
Escrow
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.
Q 06The Federal National Mortgage Association, a creation of Roosevelt's New Deal, is better known by which nickname?
Fannie Mae
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.
Q 07What is the full name of the mortgage company nicknamed Freddie Mac?
Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation
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.
Q 08Which agency, created in 1934, insures home loans made by private lenders?
The Federal Housing Administration
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.
Q 09Which Wall Street investment bank filed the largest bankruptcy in US history in September 2008?
Lehman Brothers
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.
Q 10Which kind of mortgage gave its name to the 2007-2010 crisis that followed America's housing boom?
Subprime
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.
Q 11Which 2005 bestseller argued that estate agents sell their own homes for more than they get for their clients?
Freakonomics
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.
Q 12What does the abbreviation MLS stand for in real estate?
Multiple listing service
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.
Q 13In medieval England an acre was reckoned as the land one plough team of which animals could work in a day?
Q 21The United States bought a vast northern territory from Russia in 1867 for what sum?
$7.2 million
$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.
Q 22A 1626 Dutch letter records the purchase of Manhattan Island from its Native inhabitants for how much?
60 guilders
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.
Q 23The Homestead Act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 offered settlers how much federal land?
160 acres
Oxen
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.
Q 14Which Australian colony introduced the Torrens system of land registration in 1858, since copied around the world?
South Australia
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.
Q 15Which form of home ownership reached the mainland US from Puerto Rico in the 1960s?
Condominium
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.
Q 16Monopoly is derived from a 1903 creation by Lizzie Magie called what?
The Landlord's Game
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.
Q 17The streets on the original Monopoly board are named after locations in which New Jersey resort?
Atlantic City
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.
Q 18In World War II, British intelligence smuggled what to Allied prisoners inside Monopoly sets?
Escape maps
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.
Q 19The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 cost the United States how much?
$15 million
$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.
Q 20Which two American envoys negotiated the Louisiana Purchase in Paris?
James Monroe and Robert Livingston
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.
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.
Q 24In which state did homesteading run until 1986, a decade after it ended in the rest of the US?
Alaska
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.
Q 25Between 1908 and 1940 which retailer sold entire houses as mail-order kits?
Sears
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.
Q 26Levittown, New York, the first mass-produced American suburb, was built between 1947 and 1951 for whom?
Returning World War II veterans
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.
Q 27Which 1944 law gave ex-servicemen government-backed home loans?
GI Bill
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.
Q 28Clause 25 of the original Levittown lease was a restrictive covenant that did what?
Barred non-white residents
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.
Q 29What is the 1930s practice of marking minority neighbourhoods on maps as too risky for mortgages?
Redlining
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.
Q 30The Fair Housing Act was signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1968 during riots that followed whose assassination?
Martin Luther King Jr.
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.