An emphyteutic lease is one of the variations possible of a property lease under the civil code in certain jurisdictions. The emphyteutic lease is derived from Roman Law and is thus, not unnaturally, likely to be found in those jurisdictions which are based upon said Roman Law.
Here in the Americas that means Quebec and most of Latin America rather than here in the US where civil law is largely based upon the old English Common Law.
The essential workings of an emphyteutic lease are that the owner leases the land or property on to the lessee (in common with any other form of lease of course) but with the agreement that the lessee will, over the period of the lease, add construction or improvement to the property so as to increase the value at the end of the lease period. This could be combined with a full commercial rent, a reduced one or, as often happens, a so called "peppercorn" rent: one that is minimal. The full cost of the lease is of course the cost of making the improvements plus whatever the rent is.
Recent examples in the real world of of such emphyteutic leases would be the proposal from the Italian Government that some or many of their historic buildings might be leased by the public or companies. They have a huge stock of historical buildings, villas, forts, castles and so on, the costs of maintaining or restoring them being a huge burden on the government's budget. They have therefore proposed that they should be leased for up to 99 years on peppercorn rents: but, and here's the crucial part, the lessee must restore the building to the highest standard and make sure that it is in perfect order at the end of the lease period.
The National Trust in the UK uses a similar mechanism although, because this is civil law based upon Common Law not Roman, we tend not to use the emphyteutic lease as a description. The National Trust is a charity concerned with the preservation of historic buildings and they too have far too many for their budget to be able to restore and maintain. They thus operate a similar system, whereby the lessee agrees to restore a house to its original state (something which might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars) and to return it in that state in some decades time: in the interim they pay again a peppercorn rent, perhaps a few dollars a year.
The value of an emphyteutic lease to the property holder is that it is a way for a cash strapped holder to increase the value of the asset without actually having to spend the money to do so.
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