99-year lease

A 99-year lease is, under historic English law, since widely received abroad, the longest permissible term of a lease of real property. It is no longer the law in most common law jurisdictions today, yet 99-year leases continue to be common as a matter of business practice and conventional wisdom. 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.