Real Estate 2 August 2026

Lisbon is building 11 affordable-rent flats right next to Jardim da Estrela

Lisbon city council has opened a €1.4 million public tender for a municipal building with 11 affordable-rent homes beside Jardim da Estrela.

Eleven homes do not fix Lisbon’s housing crisis. But eleven affordable-rent homes two minutes from Jardim da Estrela, in a neighbourhood where renting at market price demands a salary almost nobody earns, are rather more interesting than the number suggests.

Lisbon city council has approved a public tender for the build, with a base price of €1.4 million. The building is municipal, the flats are earmarked for below-market rent, and the council already owns the land — which, in Lisbon, is usually half the battle.

What does each home cost in this deal?

Divide it out and construction works out at roughly €127,000 per flat, before you count the land. For comparison, that is well under what a one-bedroom purchase costs in that part of the city, and that is the whole point: the council builds once and rents for decades, instead of subsidising private rents every month forever.

The approach sits alongside the stack of instruments the state and municipalities have been assembling, from reduced VAT on new construction to the simplified affordable-rent regime that waives landlords’ income tax when rents stay below the local median.

When will anyone actually live there?

This is where expectations need lowering. A tender opening now means award, appeal windows, site handover, and only then construction. In practice, projects this size in Lisbon rarely hand over keys in under two to three years from the start of the procedure — and that assumes nothing goes wrong, which in construction is a brave assumption.

Tender documents are published as they go by Lisbon City Council.

Eleven families, then, somewhere around 2028 or 2029. It is not a revolution. It is a building — and Lisbon’s housing conversation has needed more buildings and fewer round promises for quite a while.

By Duarte Figueiredo

Image: Vitor Oliveira from Torres Vedras, PORTUGAL / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Real Estate 2 August 2026

Lisbon University is opening 1,018 more student beds right as placements land

ULisboa goes from 488 to 1,506 residence beds for 2026/2027, on more than €80m of investment. Higher-education placements come out on 22 August.

There are two weeks in August that decide the year for thousands of families: the ones where higher-education placements come out and you suddenly have to find your kid somewhere to sleep in Lisbon. The arithmetic shifts slightly this year, because the University of Lisbon is adding 1,018 residence beds for the 2026/2027 academic year. Added to the 488 that opened last year, ULisboa ends up with 1,506 beds of its own. Total investment runs above €80…

Real Estate 2 August 2026

Estate agencies just had their best half-year ever and still can't find houses to sell

The first half of 2026 was historically strong for estate agencies in Portugal, even as the stock of homes for sale fell 14% in the first quarter. The housing deficit is estimated at 800,000 to one million homes.

There is a paradox in Portuguese property that has stopped being a paradox: estate agencies have just closed the best half-year in their history while complaining they have nothing to sell. Both are true at once, and that is precisely why prices refuse to stop. Official market figures are not out until 22 September, but the networks are already describing historic growth over the first six months. The backdrop is severe scarcity: in the first quarter, the…

Real Estate 1 August 2026

Portugal's mortgage rules changed on 1 August and the affordability cap drops to 45%

The Bank of Portugal's new recommendation cuts the debt-service ratio from 50% to 45%, trims exceptions to 10% and ends 100% financing on bank-owned property. In force since 1 August.

Anyone filing a mortgage application from today is measured with a different ruler: the recommended maximum debt-service ratio has fallen from 50% to 45%. In plain terms, the bank now wants your combined monthly loan payments to eat no more than 45 cents of every euro coming in. It is the share of monthly income tied up in loan repayments — mortgage, car, cards, all of it added together. The Bank of Portugal used to recommend a 50% ceiling and has cut it…

Real Estate 31 July 2026

Dutch buyers are now outbuying the British in Spain, which has never happened before

Buyers from the Netherlands have overtaken Germans and Britons in Spain's property market for the first time, even as overall foreign demand falls.

For decades the typical foreign buyer of a Spanish home was British. On some counts they were German. This year the order changed in a way almost nobody flagged in advance: the Dutch went past both. The 2025 figures already told the story — 6,289 homes bought by non-resident buyers from the Netherlands, against 6,233 for Germans and 6,152 for Britons. Small gaps, but enough to invert a ranking that had held for years. Two things at once. The first is tax:…

Real Estate 31 July 2026

Property took 46% of Portugal's foreign investment, and it has never weighed this much

Almost half the foreign direct investment that entered Portugal in 2025 went into real estate — the highest share in roughly 17 years, led by hotels, offices and data centres.

Forty-six per cent. That is the slice of foreign direct investment entering Portugal in 2025 that ended up in real estate deals — almost half of everything, and the heaviest weight in at least 17 years. Total FDI in 2025 came to 8.5 billion euros, well down on the 13.1 billion of the year before. Within investment into the equity of Portuguese entities, which totalled 11.9 billion, 3.9 billion went to property. So: less money arrived from abroad than in…

Real Estate 31 July 2026

Portugal's new building-permit rules aren't starting on 3 August after all

The Government pushed the revised RJUE building-permit regime back to 1 October 2026. Councils get two more months to ready their platforms; until then the old rules apply.

If you had a permit application on hold waiting for Monday, you now have two more months to wait. The Government approved a decree-law pushing the revised Legal Regime for Urbanisation and Building back to 1 October 2026, from the 3 August start date that had been set. Because of the councils. The reform forces municipalities to rebuild their IT platforms, configure fully digital workflows and publish their own supplementary rules, and a good share of…

Two people at a table filling in tax forms with a calculator beside them

Real Estate 30 July 2026

Your second IMI instalment is due by 31 August, but only if your bill tops 500 euros

Portugal's second IMI property tax instalment falls due on 31 August 2026, and only applies to owners paying more than 500 euros a year. How to check and how to pay.

If your IMI bill this year came in above 500 euros, put 31 August in your calendar. That is the deadline for the second of three instalments, and it is the one that catches the most people out, because it lands mid-holiday and nobody thinks about property tax with their feet in the sand. The rule is worth memorising, because plenty of owners assume they have instalments they do not actually have. IMI is split according to the total due for the year: up to…

Tugadaily chart showing Portugal's state property inventory in 2026: 60,000 identified, 80,000 target

Real Estate 30 July 2026

Portugal has now counted 60,000 state-owned properties, and wants 80,000 on the list by December

Portugal's first national inventory of state-owned property closed six months early with 60,000 buildings and plots identified. The target is around 80,000 by the end of 2026.

For decades the Portuguese state did not really know what it owned. Now it knows a large chunk of it: the first systematic survey of public real estate has closed with 60,000 properties identified, and it closed six months ahead of its own deadline. The work was done by ESTAMO, the public company that manages state property, and it is the first attempt to put all of this on one national map. That matters more than it sounds. You cannot sell, renovate,…

Residential apartment facades with balconies and laundry hanging out to dry

Real Estate 29 July 2026

Portugal's emergency rent support has 50,000-plus cases stuck, and now Deco has stepped in

The IHRU admits it cannot keep up with the 50,000-plus claimants of Portugal's Apoio Extraordinário à Renda. Consumer body Deco has partnered with the institute to help renters whose files are frozen.

More than 50,000 households in Portugal are sitting on an unresolved rent-support claim, and the institute that runs the scheme has itself admitted it cannot keep up. That is the current state of the Apoio Extraordinário à Renda, or PAER — a benefit created to soften the jump in rents and mortgage payments that has turned into a queue of its own. This week's development is that Deco has joined in. On 21 July the consumer association began a partnership…

Tugadaily chart: median house asking price per square metre, June 2026

Real Estate 28 July 2026

House prices in Portugal: the tracker

A running tracker of Portugal's housing market — the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability. Updated with each new data release.

We gather here, in one place, how Portugal's housing market is moving. Instead of one article per data point, we update this page with the essentials: the INE price index, bank valuations, rents and affordability for buyers and renters — which since 1 August also runs through the new mortgage rules, with the debt-service cap down to 45%. Official data is at INE.

Chart showing the share of listed homes with air conditioning by Portuguese city in 2026

Real Estate 28 July 2026

Only one in three homes for sale or rent in Portugal has air conditioning, and the heat is already here

Just 34% of sale and rental listings in Portugal include air conditioning, according to second-quarter 2026 data. Vila Real and Faro lead with more than half; Guarda sits at 13%.

Only 34% of homes advertised for sale or rent in Portugal have air conditioning. Across a pool of more than 200,000 properties, that means two out of every three homes on the market come with no way of cooling the place down. The figure covers the second quarter of 2026 and lands in a week when nearly all of the mainland has been under a yellow heat warning, with districts touching 40C. The timing is annoying and it says a lot about Portugal's housing…

Real Estate 28 July 2026

Portugal's interior has broken into the top 50 for rental demand

Municipalities in the Alentejo, Tras-os-Montes and the Beiras entered the top 50 for rental searches in the second quarter of 2026, while Coimbra and Porto lost over half their supply.

For years the map of people hunting for a rental in Portugal fitted inside three or four urban blobs. It does not any more. Municipalities in the Alentejo, Tras-os-Montes and the Beiras drew enough search traffic in the second quarter to enter the national top 50, places that were not in the conversation at all a short while ago. This is not a sudden romance with the countryside. It is arithmetic. When renting in the big cities becomes impossible, demand…

Real Estate 26 July 2026

Condo boards in Portugal want one insurance policy per building, and the law still says no

Six months after the storms, the association of condominium administrators is pushing for a single policy per building instead of one per apartment, to unblock claims on shared parts.

If your building took a beating in the winter storms and the insurance claim is still crawling along, there is a legal reason for that — and now a proposal to fix it. The association representing condominium management firms in Portugal spent this week arguing that each building should carry a single insurance policy instead of the current tangle. Because the law says so. A building carries as many policies as it has units — thirty apartments, thirty…

Real Estate 25 July 2026

Prosecutors want the Parede Hilton stopped and partly demolished, and Cascais is going to court

Portugal's public prosecutor has asked for work on a Hilton hotel and 120 flats near Cascais to halt, plus partial demolition. The council says the permits are legal.

An international-brand hotel and 120 nearly finished flats, less than 500 metres from the Atlantic, and now a prosecutor asking a court to stop the lot and take the top floors back down. That is where things stand in Parede, in the Cascais municipality, and the council has already said it will fight it. The public prosecutor asked for immediate suspension of works on the future Hilton hotel and the housing block beside it, and went further: it wants at…