Maybe not in common parlance, but if you lease a building for hundreds or thousands of years at a nominal rent, it's difficult to distinguish that from what you

Maybe not in common parlance, but if you lease a building for hundreds or thousands of years at a nominal rent, it's difficult to distinguish that from what you might call "true" ownership. Believe it or not that is how a lot of property is owned in some common law jurisdictions. A well-known example is Guinness's famous brewery in Dublin, which was leased in 1759 for 9,000 years at £45 per year. Long-lease ownership is particularly common for apartments, where it is important that the owner of one apartment does not do anything to impair the structural integrity of other apartments or the building as a whole, and there may also be a common area that apartment owners are obliged to maintain. This means that you must impose certain covenants on the apartment owners and traditionally the only way to do that was through leasehold ownership. Ownership is a very fuzzy concept and it is interesting to think about what are its hallmarks. There is no single correct answer, but I think a lot of lawyers tend to think of ownership as being a right "in rem" (ie, a right in respect of a thing, which is theoretically enforceable against any third party) rather than a right "in personam" (ie, a right against a particular person, which is generally not enforceable against third parties). In that regard, a leasehold is a right in rem whereas, for example, a licence to dwell on a property for a period of time would be a right in personam.