Yes, you are right. As the hilarious Non-Philosopher's Guide to Philosophical Terms says:
Realist:
Layman's meaning: Hard-headed.
Philosopher's meaning: Someone who believes in the existence of trees; usually hard-headed, but if you mean "realist about everything", decidedly soft-headed.
And since I'm at it, I can't resist myself a few more off-topic quotes:
Utilitarian:
Layman's meaning: Almost precisely cubical and made of concrete, probably a multi-storey car park.
Philosopher's meaning: One who believes that the morally right action is the one with the best consequences, so far as the distribution of happiness is concerned; a creature generally believed to be endowed with the propensity to ignore their own drowning children in order to push buttons which will cause mild sexual gratification in a warehouse full of rabbits.
Benthamite:
Layman's meaning: Substance from the planet Bentham capable of draining the super powers of Wonder Woman, or Spiderman, or some such person.
Philosopher's meaning: Someone who really would ignore their own drowning child in order to push the rabbit-gratification button.
Supervenience:
Layman's meaning: That's it! ... he's the guy that gets killed by Benthamite.
Philosopher's meaning: A one-way dependence relation between properties or facts of one type and properties or facts of another. .
"Realism" in the philosophical sense has to be relative to something - Plato's essences, "collective imagination", society, truth are among the subjects that evoke comments that this person is a realist (considers the "something" to be real), and that one isn't.
A philosophical realist w.r.t. fairies is one who believes Fairies are real, while the non-realist says talk of fairies is due to overactive agency detectors or some such thing. It will tend to seem like the opposite of everyday use of the word "realism" -- at least if the subject is one non-philosophers would ever talk about.
I mention this only because I found it a bit difficult to get, and I think I've now "got" it. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.