Commercial

Commercial property moves far less publicly than residential. A good deal of it never reaches a listing at all, because the owner is not selling — they are open to selling, which is a different state and one nobody advertises.

That is most of what this service is: identifying the buildings that would work, finding out who owns them, and asking. Many of the answers are no. The value of the ones that are not is that there is nobody else in the conversation.

What is different about buying commercial in Portugal

• Transfer tax is flat, not progressive. Non-residential urban property attracts IMT at 6.5%, with none of the sliding scale that applies to a house. Two things about that figure: it is charged on the price or the rateable value, whichever is higher, which bites on off-market buying where the agreed price can sit below the VPT — and it rises to 10% where the buyer is a company in a blacklisted jurisdiction, or controlled by one.
• AIMI usually does not apply — but check which word applies to you. The additional annual property tax excludes buildings classified for commerce, industry or services, which covers most of this category. It does not exclude terrenos para construção: a development site is caught even where what is planned on it is commercial. And the €600,000 allowance everybody quotes belongs to individuals; a company pays 0.4% on the whole taxable value with no threshold at all, which matters because portfolios are usually held through one.
• The use has to be permitted, even though the licence is gone. The old licença de utilização was abolished in January 2024. Changing a use without building work is now a prior notification with a twenty-working-day period rather than a permission to be granted — which is faster, and is not the same as unconditional. What the municipal plan allows on that street still governs, and extraction, noise, parking and the separate food-and-drink licensing regime all still bite.
• Tenants come with the building. Portuguese commercial leases are freely negotiated under the current law, but older contracts can carry terms nobody would sign today. The lease file matters more than the rent roll summarising it.

Yield is a calculation, not a number on a page

A commercial property is usually offered with a yield attached, and the figure is arithmetic done on assumptions somebody else chose. The rent may be above market and due for review downwards. The lease may have three years left rather than the ten the tenant has been there. The service charge may not recover what the building actually costs to run, in which case the shortfall is the owner’s and the quoted net figure is fiction.

None of that is hidden — it is in the lease, the accounts and the condominium minutes. It is simply not in the particulars.

What we do with all of that

We establish what the building actually is before anybody talks about price: what it is licensed for, what the plan permits, who occupies it and on what terms, and what it would cost to make it do the thing you want it to do. Then we negotiate on that basis rather than on the asking price, which on an off-market building is frequently a number somebody invented that morning.