An apartment or flat is a self-contained housing unit that occupies only part of a building.
A condominium, or condo, is the form of house tenure (rent) and other real property (oppose to “rent”, own) where a specified part of a piece of real estate (usually of an apartment house) is individually owned while use of and access to common facilities in the piece such as hallways, heating system, elevators, exterior areas is executed under legal rights associated with the individual ownership and controlled by the association of owners that jointly represent ownership of the whole piece.
Colloquially, the term is often used to refer to the unit itself in place of the word "apartment". A condominium may be simply defined as an "apartment" that the resident "owns" as opposed to rents.
A Townhouse: definitions: inNorth America it is used to describe terraced housing. In the United States and Canada, a townhouse has two connotations.[citation needed] The older predates the automobile and denotes a house on a small footprint[clarification needed] in a city, but due to having multiple floors (sometimes six or more) it has a large living space, often with servant's quarters. It is a two or three floor single-family residence. The small footprint of the townhouse allows it to be within walking or mass transit distance of business and industrial areas of the city, yet luxurious enough for wealthy residents of the city. The name "townhouse" or "townhomes" was later used to describe non-uniform units in suburban areas that are designed to mimic detached or semi-detached homes. Today, the name townhouse is used to describe units mimicking a detached home that are attached in a multi-unit complex. The distinction between dwellings called just "apartments" and those called "townhouses" is that townhouses usually consist of multiple floors and have their own outside door as opposed to having only one level and an interior hallway access. They can also be “stacked” and such townhouses have multiple units vertically (typically two), normally each with its own private entrance from the street or at least from the outside. They can be side by side in a row of three or more, in which case they are sometimes referred to as “rowhouses”. A townhouse in a group of two could be referred to as a townhouse but, in
