Land law decoded: tenure, co-ownership, leases & caveats

Tenure is the length and quality of a person's holding of land. In Singapore it comes in two broad flavours, and the exam expects you to distinguish them precisely.

• •Freehold (fee simple) — ownership of indefinite duration. It never reverts to the State. An 'estate in perpetuity' (a statutory grant) is treated as effectively equivalent.
• •Leasehold — ownership for a fixed term (commonly 99 years, sometimes 999). At expiry the land and everything on it reverts to the State, generally with NO compensation to the owner.

A 999-year lease is NOT freehold. It is legally still a lease and will, in principle, one day expire — a favourite trick in wording. ALL HDB flats are 99-year leasehold; there is no such thing as a freehold HDB flat.

The remaining lease is not just legal trivia — it drives value and financing. As a lease runs down ('lease decay'), the property is worth less (valuers apply Bala's Table), and both the loan a buyer can get and the CPF they can use tighten. This is the CPF/loan chain: a short-lease flat may be unmortgageable and unaffordable, even if the price looks cheap.

The CPF age-95 rule ties the buyer's age to the lease: if the youngest buyer's age plus the remaining lease is at least 95, full CPF may be used. If that sum is below 95 but the lease is at least 20 years, CPF is pro-rated. If the remaining lease is under 20 years, NO CPF can be used at all — cash only.

Because leasehold reverts to the State, ageing HDB estates raise the obvious question: then what? Candidates must know the routes and their differences.

• •SERS (Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme) — HDB acquires and rehouses residents. Selective and RARE; most flats will never be selected.
• •VERS (Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme) — a future scheme where residents of an older precinct VOTE on whether to take up a Government offer before lease-end.
• •En-bloc (collective sale) — private developments where owners collectively sell to a developer, subject to the required majority consent.
• •Lease Buyback Scheme (LBS) — lets ELDERLY HDB owners sell the tail-end of their lease back to HDB for retirement income while continuing to live there.

The key exam point: none of these is guaranteed. The default outcome for an ordinary 99-year flat is simply that the lease runs to zero and reverts to the State with no compensation — which is why lease decay is a real financial risk, not scaremongering.