The tenant leases for commercial properties in China, Hong Kong and Singapore are rather unique in that they are shorter.

There are no rental escalation. Typically, the tenure is less than 5 years. In Singapore and Hong Kong, the commercial offices and shopping centers have 3 to 5 year leases.

When real estate investment trusts (REITs) that owned foreign commercial properties came over to Singapore, their leases looked pretty unique to the Singapore investors.

The investors welcome the longer leases, which also usually comes with annual rental escalations. If there were no annual rental escalations, there are typically mid term reviews. However, we might have missed some of the drawbacks with these different lease structure as well.

Manulife US REIT announced their 2nd Quarter 2019 results in mid August 2019. In their slide desk, they appended one slide that explain this difference.