Residential

Most residential buyers meet the Portuguese market through a portal, which means they meet it after everybody local has already seen it. By the time a good house is listed it has usually been shown to a handful of people who were on somebody’s list, and the listing is there partly to establish that the price was tested.

Off-market sourcing is the other order. We go to the agents, the owners and the people who hear things first, with a brief that is specific enough to act on, and we find the house before it is written up.

What a brief needs to contain

The single thing that makes a search work is a brief somebody can say no to. “A villa in the Algarve with a pool” is not one; nobody can rule anything out with it. What we ask for instead is the shape of the decision: how you will use the house and in which months, what you will not compromise on, what you would accept if the rest was right, and the number above which you would rather walk away.

It is a more uncomfortable conversation than a wish list, and it is what makes the difference between a search and a mailing list.

What gets checked before you are committed

In Portugal the things that sink a residential purchase are rarely the things a survey looks for.

• The registry against the building. Extensions, pools, annexes and converted garages built without consent are common. They surface when a lawyer compares the certidão permanente and the caderneta predial with what is actually standing, and regularising them is sometimes possible and sometimes not.
• The rateable value, against the price. IMT is charged on the price or the valor patrimonial tributário, whichever is higher — so on a property whose VPT sits above what has been agreed, the tax is calculated on a number nobody is paying. It is worth knowing before the offer rather than at the deed.
• The paperwork for the use, which changed in 2024. The autorização de utilização — the document most guides still call a licença de utilização — was abolished in January 2024 by the Simplex Urbanístico reforms. There is no longer an alvará to ask for. What should exist instead is the work director’s termo de responsabilidade and proof it was delivered to the council, and where the use has been changed, the prior notification that permitted it. Buildings finished before the 1951 building code need none of it, unless work was done to them since — which, on an old house that has obviously been altered, is the question.
• What the neighbours are entitled to build. The municipal plan is public, and the view somebody is buying is worth checking against it.

Then the part that costs money

We negotiate, and we do it knowing what the seller wants that is not price — a completion date, a rental left running until autumn, furniture taken or left. Those are usually worth more to a seller than the last two per cent, and they are invisible to a buyer working through a portal.