Hotels

A hotel purchase is three purchases at once. There is a building, which has the ordinary questions any building has. There is a licence, which is not the same thing as the building and does not always travel with it. And there is a trading business, with staff, forward bookings and a reputation that can be checked.

Buyers who treat it as one purchase tend to discover the other two late.

The licence is its own question

Portugal distinguishes between an empreendimento turístico — a classified tourist establishment, which is what a hotel is — and alojamento local, the short-let registration that covers apartments and small guest houses. They are different regimes with different rules, different obligations and different consequences on a sale, and a property marketed as “licensed for tourism” may hold either.

Which it holds changes the answer to almost every following question: what can be operated there, what must be provided, and what the classification obliges.

On the alojamento local side there is one point worth stating carefully, because it is widely repeated in the wrong form. Since 2024 an AL registration does not lapse when a property changes hands — that rule was repealed. What councils may still do, in declared containment areas and for houses and apartments only, is attach limits on transmissibility to registrations issued there. So whether a particular registration passes on to you depends on where it is and when it was issued, and it is a question with an answer rather than a risk to price in.

Converting a building that holds neither is a municipal process rather than a formality, and it is one where the honest answer is often that it will take longer than the seller suggests.

The tax treatment, and the part nobody mentions

A hotel building is non-residential, so IMT is charged at a flat 6.5% rather than on the residential sliding scale — on the price or the rateable value, whichever is higher, and at 10% rather than 6.5% where the buyer is a company in a blacklisted jurisdiction. AIMI, the additional annual property charge, excludes buildings classified for commerce, industry or services, which a classified hotel normally is. It does not exclude a development site, and the €600,000 allowance belongs to individuals — a company pays from the first euro.

The item that moves the numbers most is the one least often raised: the utilidade turística regime, which can carry real IMT and IMI relief for a qualifying tourist development. It is not automatic, it is not permanent, and some councils have been moving to curtail it. It is worth establishing what a specific property does and does not hold rather than assuming either way.

What we do

We establish which regime the property is actually under, what the classification obliges an operator to provide, what the business would look like under new ownership rather than under the current one, and what the seasonality really is once the peak months are separated out. Then we negotiate on the building, the licence and the business as three things, because that is what they are.