Why Complete Cross Lease Conversion to Freehold Title

A cross lease titles is where multiple individuals own an undivided share of the underlying land. Each individual would build a house and that area of land would be leased from the other owners. Generally, these leases would be for a term of 999 years.

Cross lease developments were a popular historic form of development when Councils’ rules generally didn’t allow for high density subdivisions but did allow for multiple houses to be built on a site. Later they were used as the development requirements were less onerous and to avoid reserve contribution requirements at the time. As such cross lease developments could be created around these houses at a significantly cheaper cost than a fee simple development. With changes to Council rules following the introduction of the Resource Management Act 1991 the advantages that encouraged their use have diminished greatly and almost no new developments use this form of tenure. However, since many of the existing dwellings on cross-lease titles have had alterations and require cross-lease updates their titles are deemed to be defective.

Read more about the benefits of upgrading a cross-lease title to fee simple.

Or, if you’re already sold on making the switch, learn about the cross-lease to fee simple process.