Goodbye, Golden Visa

With Mais Habitação program, real estate investment options are eliminated. However other investment routes will remain available for those interested in that Golden Visa program.

This program is just a desperate attempt by a government that has been for more than 8 years and is at the end of its political cycle, and which has done nothing to solve the housing problem. It now expects the private sector to solve the problem that this government has been unable to solve for years. Nothing very significant will happen as long as this government is there...

The trouble I found generally was that Portuguese tenants play a nasty game.

I put all my savings into  two small one bed cottages thinking this would be a good investment and would give me a bit more money alongside my state pension. I spent time painting and general updating. They were lovely and spotlessly clean. I was in undated with applicants  and decided with the lawyer to start with a six month lease and if the tenants were nice I would extend for another year. Unfortunately they were far from nice. After three months they both decided not to pay. It has been a total nightmare. The law is totally on the side of the tenant and  the Lawyer was useless. When eventually they left the houses were in a terrible state. Never again. I will have to fix them up and sell.

It's not just the "portuguese" tenants. There are expats who do the same or worse. There are bad people everywhere. But I know what you mean. I know this problem very well. That's why there are so many empty houses. And the rental law was once much worse. Now it's more balanced for both sides.

More on forced rental of vacant houses -- reported last spring when I guess this measure was initially proposed --

The Câmara Municipal has the means to identify vacant houses using information provided by utilities, and in principle has been doing this for years for the sake of property tax adjustment.  There are two Portuguese words here that mean "vacant" - vaga, and devoluta.

Forced rental can happen once the Câmara has declared the house devoluta, for the specified length of time -- but in the past, the Câmaras have not really been doing this, so the houses in this status are not real numerous.  I think it's also up to the Câmara to take the next step and force rental, so ... possibly some room for corruption here, lack of initiative, etc., factors that impede the law's intentions from being realized.

@donn25,

This whole programme depends on local councils declaring a house vacant. As it happens, many councils have already said they won't do this work. So this programme is completely useless.

Reading the above I can only hope that there are parties waiting to be elected which will perform better than the current government. I also assume that the massive immigration promotion campaingn plus the invitation of over 50.000 Ukrainians to the country have helped the housing situation.

I think what will have an much bigger impact, on for example D7 visa numbers, will be the abolishment of the NHR (Non Habitual Tax Resident) program for all new applications starting next year. This will have a massive tax impact on many passive income immigrants.

The reasons given for the cancellation of the NHR and the GV are fairly suspect. Among the reasons given, one is that they caused a massive housing price increase, but in total, only ~27,000 people (est from 2019) have EVER been granted NHR status from the time the program was initiated in 2009. The idea that 27,000 house purchases over that period (assuming all actually bought property) would account for the house price boom is ridiculous, yet that is what we are supposed to believe...

Even if you take the 2019 estimate and assume an average increase of 3,000 per year, project to 2023, that's a total of 39,000 people. These visas aren't the problem, the problem in my best guess is general foreign investment in the property market for the sole purpose of rental income, rather than residence.

27,000 NHR, or Golden Visa?

If the golden visa avoided creating a problem only because it wasn't much used, that isn't a very good argument for it.  The argument against makes sense to me - let's not reward buyers for paying too much.  That said, I'm with you on investment purchases - big problem all over the world, that has to be prevented as much as possible.  But there's a lot of money saying let's not solve that problem.