Residential Ground Lease This Residential Ground Lease: Fill & Download for Free

You can buy freehold residential land in Zimbabwe. Other types of properties (e.g. farms) can be either freehold or leasehold (typically the larger commercial farms are freehold, a legacy of colonial times) however are difficult for foreigners to own.

In fact, all land in Hong Kong is state-owned land. People cannot buy and sell land in Hong Kong. People buy and sell ground leases (although some of those leases are 999-year leases). This might sound a lot like the system in Mainland China, because Hong Kong invented it first and then the Mainland copied it.If Beijing were to do this directly you'd have massive riots and you'd have to declare martial law. It's also likely that the US and UK would impose trade sanctions on Hong Kong. All of the people that are protesting against Beijing now would protest even harder, and all of the people that now support Beijing would join them. Even the people that want more construction don't want this to be dictated from Beijing.One funny thing about Hong Kong politics is that if it comes from Beijing, everyone will oppose it. It doesn't matter how good it is. If Beijing suggests it, it must be bad. Also, if there you want to blame someone, Beijing is a nice target. This is why I think Beijing really genuinely wants some sort of election system in Hong Kong, because as long as the CE isn't totally crazy, they don't want to keep getting blamed for everything that goes wrong in Hong Kong.The ironic thing in all of this is the Beijing really doesn't care what Hong Kong does.As far as details....Legally, the basic issue is the Basic Law of Hong Kong and the Sino-British Joint Declaration specifically state that land leases in Hong Kong are to be protected. To change that would be that the PRC would be violating its commitments to the UK. In additional, while it is theoretically possible to change the Basic Law, no one really wants that to happen because once you change that, then everything else changes.However, there is really no reason for doing this. While Beijing does not have the authority to seize land directly, the local Hong Kong government can. Most land in Hong Kong is empty and there is nothing that legally keeps the local government from massively building in the New Territorities, and the local government has the authority to seize land as long as compensation is paid.As long as no one is protesting, Beijing simply does not care what Hong Kong does. The current HK government is controlled by land developers, but Beijing would not mind care if some group that was massively anti-developer ran the Hong Kong government as long as they could keep Hong Kong quiet and happy.Politics in Hong Kong (like politics everywhere) is more complex than it seems. One problem that the major middle class pan-democrat parties have is that they are rather pro-developer, because a lot of middle class people owe property. This is one reason I think that the moderate pan-democrats are going to have problems in the next elections, because they haven't taken (and are unlikely to take) a massive anti-developer position. The parties that represent the poor are also not anti-developer, because the poor in Hong Kong have access to public housing.Politics makes strange bedfellows, so I'm pretty sure that there are going to be some weird political alliances coming up.

The way the situation you describe are typically done through a Land Lease / Ground Lease. If your father did not actually own the property he was building on, it would be very difficult to construct a building without having a Land Lease or some other written document guaranteeing and protecting his improvements to the property for a term like 49-years or 99-years or more. Your father probably would not have been able to get conventional or even non-traditional financing if he had no protection. It's not likely he would be able to insure a completed building without a proper Land Lease. If your father did not control the property, he would have to commit fraud on construction permits and in hiring contractors, architects, and attorneys. If somehow he was able to construct it and insure it and you destructed it, then you would probably be sued by the insurance company.You say your father already owns just the building? How is this structured and how did this come to be? If you'd like to redevelop the property with him, then you should come to agreeable terms on acquiring the Master Lease and form a Joint Venture with him to redevelop the property.It is not rare in New York City for buildings to be built on leased-real estate. When Harry Helmsley and Lawrence A. Wien and associates purchased The Empire State Building in 1964, they signed a new 112-year Ground Lease with Prudential Insurance, who purchased the land beneath the building in 1951 (see: Empire State Building Owners Plan to Form Public Company & PERSPECTIVES;The Empire State Building's Two-Front Campaign). There are a number of Co-Operative and Condominium residential apartment buildings built on Land-Leases (see this article: Consider Both Sides In Land-Lease Deals).The next thing to do is talk to an attorney who has experience in Ground Leases.IANAL.