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99-year lease

Historical maximum lease time From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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A 99-year lease is, under historic English law, since widely received abroad, was traditionally seen as the longest practical term of a lease of real property without it being considered perpetual. It is no longer a hard legal limit in most common law jurisdictions today, 99-year leases continue to be common as a matter of business practice. In some countries (such as Singapore) land reform legislation has resulted in most or all land being owned by the state and leased to users, which often takes the form of a 99-year lease. In this case, the lease is often transferable and treated as essentially equivalent to ownership, at least to the extent that it is the main way in which one may purchase the more or less permanent use of land.

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The law

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Under the traditional common law doctrine, the 99-year term was not literal, but merely an arbitrary time span beyond the life expectancy of any possible lessee (user) or lessor (owner).[1][2]

William Blackstone (1723–1781, of Commentaries on the Laws of England fame) states that a lease was formerly limited to 40 years, although much longer leases (for 300 years, or 1000 years) were in use by the time of Edward III.[3] The 40-year limit was based on the text The Mirror of Justices (book 2, chapter 27).

In the law of some US states, including Alabama [4] a 99-year lease is the longest possible contract for real estate by statute, but many states such as California and New York allow infinite terms.[5] In Kentucky, the maximum lease contract for real estate is 40 years [6]

Due to the influence of the ideas of Henry George at the time the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) was established in the early 20th century, all residential land in the ACT was held under 99-year Crown leases, the first of which expired in 2023.[7]

The 99‑year lease term has also been used in a number of historic colonial and international territorial concessions- for example, the United Kingdom’s 1898 lease of the New Territories in Hong Kong and Germany’s 1898 lease of Kiautschou Bay, both for 99 years—though such terms have appeared under both common law and civil law systems. [8]

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Examples

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References

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