[tialaramex]

Historically Leasehold was a necessary evil when two or more owners occupy the same 2D real property, as is common for example with flats (or "apartments" in US English) or where they unavoidably share parts of the property.

England (and perhaps other places?) tried to fix this with Commondhold. The idea in Commonhold is pretty similar to Leasehold except that the Freehold of the 2D real property is held by a purpose made entity whose constituents are the owners of the properties contained in the Commonhold, so there can't be some dodgy offshore property holding company involved, between them the people who seem to own the place really do own it outright. Most likely they'll choose to outsource day-to-day management to a company which specialises just as the property holding company does, but as joint owners they have powers to fire that management company or demand to inspect its finances to see everything is done properly, and if somebody thinks they can do better (or has far too much free time on their hands) that's an option with consent of the other owners, it's nobody else's business.

Unfortunately Commonhold was not a success. The tax status means that you can sell say 12 flats on Leasehold for £100 000 each, and then also sell the Freehold to a holding company for say £60 000. But if you offer those 12 flats as Commonhold, leaving nothing else to sell, the buyers will be reluctant to part with £105 000 each even though there's a good chance that Freeholder will ask for say £1000pa ground rent, so they'd be clearly ahead after just five years.

So as a property builder it made no sense to sell Commondhold properties - the government didn't ban Leasehold for new properties, so Leasehold it is in almost every case.

[rcxdude]

The thing I don't understand about Commonhold is that it seems to be exactly the same as a lot of existing leasehold properties: About half of the leasehole properties I looked at when buying (generally the ones which were 2-4 flats in a building as opposed to a larger block) involved also getting a part share of the freehold. Also, you have a lot of rights as a leaseholder, especially as a group, so you can claim the freehold if the freeholder is charging excessively, so I'm not sure how much the change actually benefits you (If the government wanted to reduce abuses by freeholders, they would focus on making this process less expensive and messy).

[tialaramex]

Commonhold mostly tidies up the situation you describe, by writing it into the Law of the land rather than into individual leases and other paperwork. In the process it gets rid of the lease itself, since the freeholder exists only to further the goals of the Commonhold owners there's no need for finite leases which must be extended. So instead of paying some lawyer quite a lot of money for little more than a bit of photocopying and pasting stuff into forms every so often, that's all built in to a Commonhold out of the box.

[dbdjfjrjvebd]

Plenty of other countries only have equivalent systems to commonhold.

Personally I value leasehold property as worthless. I wonder how many other people do? And how much this contributes to UK people being reluctant to live in flats?

[rcxdude]

The lease has a market value, and a utility, and comes with a pretty robust set of rights. I think it is wrong to write it off as worthless. That said, leases have a lot of variety, and some are better than others (and one reason for a general distrust of new build properties in the UK is newer leases tend to be a lot worse for the holder than older ones, in some cases catastrophically so). Free hold is almost never going to be worse, but lease hold can be just as good for most people.

[dbdjfjrjvebd]

The biggest most important right is to buy the freehold (or extend the lease). I would rather just own a freehold...

As another poster pointed out many leaseholds today come with a share of freehold anyway.