Portugal proposes to end Golden Visas, curtail Airbnb rentals
reuters.com
reuters.com
I couldn't find a primary source but all sources say the same as this one: https://www.imidaily.com/datacenter/portugal-data/
The program lets in on the order of a few thousand people per year.
Other visa programs there vastly outstrip this is number.
The golden visa is just a great marketing term for political ire. It implies wealthy privilege so it's easily targeted.
Of course, the reality of things is that Portugal has recently rightly earned a reputation for being a great place to live and people (not many of them super rich) decided to live there. Housing is being built to compensate.
The airbnb thing is more interesting and nuanced but harder to get a handle on. It might be that airbnb is causing some unhealthy things in the real estate market.
The golden visa wasnt already the big deal since it wa slimited, but the digital nomad visa (over two thousand issued in just a few months) and the open door policy of this government (you dont need even a promis eof work anymore to just come to portugal) overwhelmed the services. And then there is the stupid laws that lawyers and other classes working in behalf of clients have priority in these services
For each applicant, there is a ~1500 application fee and ~1500 healthcare fee ( NHS, 3 years). Ofcourse you will be paying for NHS twice because you also pay the taxes to fund NHS. Spesifics will differe with individual case, but thats the broad strokes.
If you need a lawyer to explain something, they rarely get up for less than £500
That process will be over soon, and SEF may find it has time to spend on other issues.
For a stay of up to three months[0], yes.
Remember that when people talk about freedom of movement within the EU it's actually the free movement of workers[1], meaning beyond three months, you have to meet certain conditions, and will likely need to demonstrate you have income/employment/insurance/social security/pension...
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju... [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/41/free-m...
Certainly, for the purpose of this discussion the point is that anyone who's got EEA or Swiss citizenship can freely move and live in Portugal. So if some people in Portugal think they are being overwhelmed there is actually little they can do.
Are you suggesting that EU citizens are allowed to stay for more than 3 months in Portugal without a residency certificate?
> In fact no-one tracks who's in the country and how long they stay
This is typically completely fine, right up until the moment anyone in authority gets a reason to start asking questions:
"When did you arrive in Portugal, mytailorisrich?" "Ah, over three months ago. Can you show me your residency certificate?" <sucks air through teeth> "Can you explain why you didn't get a residency certificate?"
(Assuming of course that you are staying in hotels and airbnbs, or even at relatives / friends - of course, if you rent and register officially then it is obvious.)
It's not like police is ramping up people who stand somewhere for longer than N months. These cases typically come up because people end up homeless, are trying to start claiming benefits, are dodging taxes or are otherwise appearing in front of the authorities.
At least here in the democratic republic of Hungary: Cell network subscriber logs, ATM/POS flags, the passport number you enter when getting your public transit pass, the filed invoice the phone repair shop fills out when you get your battery replaced.
If you're a backpacking 20 year old it's very unlikely anything will happen to you, but if you're running a business or a "digital nomad" making FAANG salaries you'll get a rude awakening one morning with a knock on the door.
The whole discussion is not very relevant and is a nitpick. The point is that anyone in the EEA/Switzerland can freely move to Portugal (or any other country) and that unless you get onto the authorities' radar very negatively you are safe. The vast majority of people will have an income and/or look for work and will be entitled to stay, anyway.
That's fine, until it isn't.
> You don't even need a passport, your ID card is sufficient for travelling inside the EU
I've slightly lost track of the scenario here. Are we talking about a hypothetical northern European who basically moves to Portugal without telling anyone? Is she registered as self-employed? Does she have a bank account? Does she have any dependents? Does she own a car? Does she have insurance? Does she still have a permanent postal address in the northern European country?
Are all those things running as if she were still living in her original EU country, and she's just in Portugal "off the books"?
If so, wow. Good luck.
Because you know, they are coming from somewhere, another EU country, where they have a permanent address, a bank account, a job even (they are just working remotely), a mobile which works for the first few months via free roaming, a car which they take back to their home country for the yearly checks, health insurance which is technically only valid for emergencies in another EU country (but if you are seriously ill you'll probably want to go home anyway)...
It may or may not work in all cases (for example, in Italy they like to confiscate cars with foreign license plates that are illegally staying there - don't ask me how they know).
But if you imagine an average 20 something, still living with their parents, but wanting to travel across Europe while working remotely, then today this is very easy and straightforward to do. Without telling anyone. Except their parents, of course :)
In practice it's nonsense to pretend you can just turn up. You need access to the health service, you can't rent without a tax ID, your car needs to be insured, and so on. All of which require registration. And there are occasional ID checks, which will raise questions if you don't have a residency certificate.
So even if you want to live out of your car - which sounds like fun - you're still going to leave a paper trail and face some risk of awkward questions and perhaps a fine and/or deportation.
No, in practice it's nonsense to pretend you can't.
You can rent short term apartments (airbnbs for example, but there are other services). Or you can just stay at hotels.
Why would you need extra car insurance? Is your car insurance not valid for all of Europe?
Why would you need access to the health service (beyond emergencies, which are already covered by your EU insurance card)?
Occasinal ID checks? But what do they check? They can check if your ID card is valid and you are not wanted for crime.
Sure, you leave some minimal paper trail, but in reality no one ever checks, no one knows, no one cares.
I'm not saying anybody SHOULD do this, but there are some people who definitely COULD.
Check the wording of your car insurance policy. I doubt regular car insurance covers moving abroad without telling them. Oh, and the vehicle registration isn't going to be valid either[0].
Let's say our hypothetical person has a car accident, a serious one, where the police get involved.
She was driving her (say) Swedish car, with [technically invalid] Swedish insurance, with [technically invalid] Swedish registration and number plates, they ask her for her ID, she shows her Swedish ID card [can't show a residency permit, she chose not to get one].
One big hole she digs herself if she starts lying to the police. A different hole, but a hole nevertheless, if she tells the truth.
> I'm not saying anybody SHOULD do this [..]
Quite
> but there are some people who definitely COULD.
(Not wishing to sound too old and grumpy) but there might just be a whiff of this sounding like it's the story of young privileged well-off types who can't be bothered to follow rules everyone else has to, thinking it doesn't apply to them, and expecting to get away with it when things go wrong? :)
[0] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/vehicles/registration/...
Yes northen europeans just living in portual/spain without telling anyone. Its typical example.
Also most people traveling/living europe like this tend to travel somewhere every 3 months (often to their home country).
You reset the counter by traveling. The rules are not enforced especially if you are bringing money and behaving nicely.
Nothing happens.
Or what would happen?
You can also be self-employed in that country or a student. So it does not apply just for workers. My guess is that its written in that way to give police power to remove homeless people from different countries.
Despite what some may think, students do work. At least some of the time :)
> homeless people
Not wishing to sound negative, but when the Treaty of Rome was signed, way way back in 1957, I doubt anyone was thinking about the homeless.
Doug the Head : We've got sandy beaches...
Avi : So? Who the fuck wants to see 'em?
Police helpline: How many do you reckon?
Me: Around 7 billion
It was mostly used for wealthy foreigners to acquire real estate, hence the ire. As for AirBnb, it has decimated historical neighbourhoods in Lisbon and turned its historical areas into a kind of theme park.
When willvl the West finally learns the lesson that unaffordable realestate is uneconomic suicide just like unaffordable food would be
We've already seen this in the UK, where a drum beat of race hate aimed at immigrants and refugees has been used to misdirect the population away from neoliberal austerity and "low tax, small government" (big profit) policies.
Which - not coincidentally - include a huge amount of literal rent seeking and property profiteering.
I have friends living in Lisbon and Porto for 10+ years, others that were born and raised there. All of them mention how entire neighbourhoods are slowly being emptied out from locals and getting rented on AirBnB. It's more profitable to rent an apartment short-term for a season than having permanent tenants. There are neighbourhoods hollowed out from people living in them and are just boxes to be rented during peak tourism season and left empty during winter.
It's not so nuanced if you see the transformation happening in your city, you notice your friends living further and further away from where they grew up, you walk through the same places and see the language being spoken on the streets is not what you were used to. You check prices for T1 and T2 apartments and they skyrocketed, are very hard to find through real estate services but can be found easily on AirBnB.
This goes for many of the listings on AirBnB in Amsterdam, four stories worth of not-quite-a-hotel instead of room for four families to live are pretty common. And there always was a housing shortage in Amsterdam, now it is much worse than before.
If there’s any truth to that, then I’d say their rental market is pretty well-protected from foreign workers, to say the least…
Somehow the regulators (and governments) prefer more money over their own citizens. Banning short term rentals would solve (or atleast reduce) housing problems in many cities, while tourists can still come and stay in hotels.
So, you need to both build new stuff and ban airbnb for any chance that normal people with normal incomes will ever be able to afford to buy anything decent to live in. Also somehow stop buying realestate for investments. Also fix zoning laws in many places. Also...
this is by choice.
> and all the houses and apartments are bought by 'investors' that then use them for airbnb
if the demand is there then the only sensible solution is to build a lot more.
The places where AirBNB and their like are causing problems are not in the places where there's abundant land going, it's in the areas where there's significant tourist demand. This is in the cultural hubs.
People with capital are able to buy up the limited stock of housing and make a lot more money through short-stay, rather than long-term tenants.
This causes major flow-on effects.
Businesses which cater to long-term residents find their customers disappearing, and leave in favour of those catering to tourists/visitors.
The nature of the people in the area change: people in short-term stays are less likely to respect the local cultural-norms like not partying until 3am, or other behaviours.
The people who work in the local businesses, find it harder to do so - instead having to commute from longer distances because they now can't afford the rents/property prices locally.
Knocking down a few apartment blocks and putting in more high-density accommodation won't solve it.
sure you can. it's just that people don't want to.
> That's where tourists
aka money.
I bring up low interest rates because getting a larger amount for a mortgage is cheaper, buyers will go to banks to check what's the largest mortgage they can get to fit into their budget to then go shopping for a house, so the prices are directly correlated to how much credit you're able to get, pushing prices upwards which the investors/developers can scoop up.
Now prices are extremely high, mortgages aren't so easy to get and we see prices going down (here in Sweden there's been a 10-20% fall), but they are still much, much higher than 10-15 years ago. It's pushed people like me, with a decent salary but no family wealth whatsoever to be basically priced out of the market. I'd need to save about 20-30% of my net salary every month for about 2-3 years to afford just the down payment for a small apartment on the outskirts of the city. I'm not able to do that while my parents depend on me and I still have rent to pay.
Yes it does, and I'm tired of pretending that it doesn't.
If I want to build a house in Portugal, if I am even allowed to do so, I will have to spend about half of the cost to the government.
From VAT, to real estate tax, to licensing fees, etc... That's a significant portion of the cash spent going directly to the state for no actual practical reason.
And that's not even mentioning the time spent dealing with all that, or the fact that housing is essentially banned in the majority of the country.
My family has been in real estate for generations, and Ive listened to multiple generations on both sides of the family for years struggle with these politically inflicted issues.
There is no housing crisis.
There is a political choice to make housing unaffordable and unbuildable. Anything that doesn't address that issue will only make things worse.
[0] https://ggwash.org/view/10809/housing-is-more-than-supply-an...
I can assure you, if you build 1000 times as many houses as there are people who want to live there, housing prices there will decrease.
Also, why do you think you should be the arbiter of what "enough" is?
What right do you have over the property of others?
There are close to enough for the locals. The problem is when tourists feel entitled to houses, like I said. Stick them on the periphery, and let the locals actually live where they work. Instead, we're doing the opposite, and destroying cities and neighbourhoods and pricing out locals in the process.
> What right do you have over the property of others?
I suspect this is where we're going to inherently disagree. People don't own their property in a vacuum, nor do they (nor should they) have unlimited 'rights' to do what they want with it. We don't let people dump toxic waste or oil on their properties for good reasons, and I think extending this to short-term lets is perfectly sensible due to the overwhelmingly negative benefit it has on residents. Doubly so when its corporate landlords in question doing it.
[0] https://blog.shelter.org.uk/2019/08/more-planning-permission...
[This chart on it's own with no further context is enough to disprove any argument anyone may have that attempts to claim housing prices aren't solved by building more housing](https://twitter.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/161535236504076697...)
It's really that simple.
It doesn't, because the housing market is not the "free" market like the one for commodities, but is an asset heavily manipulated by government, banks, NIBYs and institutional investors to maintain a steady increase in value of their investments above inflation, and incidentally above wage growth. The bigger the growth of their investments, the better for them.
This sort of stuff sets in, and then of course people are shocked that their entire local economy lives or dies off of one season. We should build more housing of course, but limiting the percentage of places that can just be sitting empty most of the years seems super important. At least making it extremely expensive to keep them empty
I'm currently living in Nashville, Tennessee, and one can see the same effect here.
The town is completely unequipped to handle the level of tourism and unregulated hotels it has. The price of housing has shot up to insane levels (by local pay standards), and neighborhoods are inundated with drunken revelers.
I would never wish this fate on a city, but many seem to foster/welcome it with open arms. I know Nashville has, because the tourist money spends. But be careful what you with for, turning a city into a theme park / tourist destination has some horrible effects on the people who actually live there, and it seems like it should not be sustainable.
Plus, there's something like 700k empty houses, for some reason on another.
There's no lack of houses for everyone, just hoarding and speculation.
Expats were able to evade all taxes due to crypto exemption, and rules for income from foreign country companies. Locals fund social infrastructure while expats use it, dry out the housing market, and raise prices through gentrification.
Golden visas are a loophole for sanctions against Russia's aggression (at least one well known oligarch has a Portuguese golden visa), and it's ironic that you can buy a visa with 200k while refugees die in the Mediterranean trying to seek asylum and safety.
It's hard to enforce.
Quite a few digital nomads are tax frauds, though.
So now they are not only potential tax evaders both in their host country and their country of origin, a crime in many countries worthy of lengthy jail sentences, but also tack a visa violation on top of it.
At some point, I think it flips from “a genuine tourist” to “an undocumented worker”, but I don’t think it’s easy to tell exactly when, especially if the actual job isn’t a local one.
If I’m on a tourist visa and taking a local job, the country’s documented workers should rightly feel cheated. If I’m on a tourist visa and brought my own job from outside the country, I’m not sure those workers have nearly as much standing to feel I’m cheating them.
I would not be surprised, but that's a question for the lawyer and the answer may vary by which country you're in under a tourist visa.
And likewise you may be owed overtime ;)
> If I’m on a tourist visa and brought my own job from outside the country, I’m not sure those workers have nearly as much standing to feel I’m cheating them.
Yeah well people are weird and not always consistent. From my point of view, people seem to care more about "immigrants taking our jobs" than they do about "foreigners staying at home and the factory was moved to where they already live" (not zero for the latter, this is just my opinion of the relative noise people seem to make).
Being a digital nomad does open great ways to pay very little tax but to do that legally is a more complicated process than just ignoring tax and not paying any attention to dual taxation agreements.
This is technically correct, but many other countries use a similar principle called the worldwide income principle, in which all your income, no matter where it is being earned, is taxable in the country they originate in / spend most of their time in (rules vary widely, I am not a tax lawyer).
There are a few extremely rare exceptions to that, most notably the US, which wants to tax US citizens on any income generated, regardless of where they live and where the income is from. So a US citizen living in France getting paid from a French company has to pay taxes to France (due to living there) and the US (due to being a US citizen). There are tax treaties so the taxes paid to France would be deducted from what is owed to the US.
A Turkish citizen mostly living in Germany (-> Steuerinländer), but working in France for a French company will pay German and French income taxes (and may get the French taxes back from Germany after handing in his tax forms next year).
It's the same thing, only that nationality does not matter, residence does.
But for example, if you live in Canada and decide to travel to a few countries for a few months at a time as a digital nomad, getting paid in those countries, then come back to Canada, you have to declare and pay tax on all that foreign income in Canada.
You need to actually break tax residency in Canada in order to stop paying taxes. And it's not easy, you need to pay all capital gains tax due as if you sold everything the day you break residency.
Generally speaking, you don’t become a tax resident of a country unless you live there for 183 days in a given tax year. Even then, getting set up to pay taxes is a challenge, as tax departments aren’t set up to accept money from a tourist who doesn’t have any official ties to the country. It can be done, but it’s a pain.
As a digital nomad myself, I always planned to just never stay in a country longer than six months. As an American, I have the joy of paying American taxes anywhere I live in the world, which makes things extra fun.
For now, it seems systems are not streamlined to handle the burden of a high number of short term residents. Countries will adapt over time, as it seems Portugal is doing now. Some countries issuing digital nomad visas may exempt nomads from paying taxes or make it easier to pay taxes locally.
183 days may indeed be sufficient to automatically qualify you for tax residency, but there are other tests, if you're not careful you may (unwittingly) become tax resident in a country with a stay of less than 183 days.
Perhaps significantly less, depending on where else you've been (and for how long), and what you were doing in the year(s) before the year in question.
See - for instance - the Statutory Residence Test ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rdr3-statutory-re... ) in the UK.
Digital nomads are still too new a phenomenon that countries really properly seek to tax them but just traveling like this without being careful or creating a company in a country with low taxation is not necessarily safe.
We need wealth tax, property tax, land value tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax, and nationalised resource industries so we wouldn't need any VAT or income tax at all.
Wat.
No. Portugal doesn't accept Russian citizens for golden visa since the war started. And do not process applications started before.
> one well known oligarch has a Portuguese golden visa
No. He didn't do the golden visa. He got it in a different way. He have got it "under a law that offered naturalization to descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Portugal about 500 years ago during the inquisition". And he received it about a year before the war and the sanctions.
AirBnB is what has been causing the problem with affordable accommodation in the city centres. Tourists want easy access to everything downtown, same as students and young professionals, and at 100 euros a night or whatever the going rate is is unbeatable for yield.
The trick now is to start turning these places back into HMOs / family apartments. It's nice that they've been done up, now time to give them over to local residents. If some 'funny money' gets royally screwed in the process, then all the better.
The one that will cause the most controversy is the State taking over unused housing, making improvements if needed, and then renting the properties (with the money going to the owners after deducting expenses). Yeah, I'm sure that will go over well...
Do you have any better source for the final list of measures?
And unlike normal nationalization campaigns, it's easy to keep the government from making itself the owner's administrator: just rent out your rental properties. I understand that it's nicer to let them sit empty and wait for prices to double and not deal with renters because rents are a joke compared to price increases, but that's not going to work out.
I could live with a different alternative: the government declaring the buildings condemned and rezoning them as non-construction ground. That'll quickly motivate investors to actually put the houses to use.
Obviously this is a small sample size, but my impression was the people I talked to all genuinely welcomed foreigners (and their money, sure) in a way I haven’t experienced in many other places. Other expats I talked to in Portugal agreed with this.
I think the Portuguese may find that the only thing worse than positive net migration is negative net migration.
It was a very nice country, and I totally support their desire to keep it that way. With the understanding that it's hard to get foreigners' money without making some tradeoffs (namely, your main industry becomes catering to their needs).
With the few natives I talked to, a common dream was to go to America and save up enough money to come back home and be wealthy.
That surely is one reason prices are skyrocketing right now, as many who went abroad in the 70s and 80s are returning for their retirement.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
AirBnB has wrecked city centres (Lisbon, Porto). Banning it, right now, is the only thing that will help. However AirBnB is putting money into the pockets of many Portuguese families who were lucky enough to own downtown properties (in what were previously undesirable locations e.g. by the river). Thus politically this may be difficult.
Much easier to blame golden visa holders (correctly - but a lower order cause), but also Digital Nomads and other foreign workers (not including the foreign workers from the former colonies who do all the grotty jobs of course - they don't mind them). Sadly this has crept into online and public discourse.
However Digital Nomads don't really earn that much in the grand scheme of things typically, and also tend to be paid from outside Portugal, tax breaks aside surely they are a net benefit.
Edit: here is the link: https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/0214/1356617-immigrant...
International Organizations are mentioned (which is probably code for the EU)
It's too bad, because I'd love to retire to a sunny country in the Mediterranean, but by the time I retire I suspect golden visa programs will have gone, and there aren't really a lot of options for visas in retirement.
It's tricky, because a lot of countries see "live here for a long enough time and of course you should become a citizen" as only fair. But it might keep everyone happy.
That's a pretty hilariously optimistic view of the effectiveness and cohesion of the EU.
Portugal does have a housing crisis. The golden visa allows buying residential real estate as a qualifying “investment”. The government could simply end that part. Or even require building new affordable housing units.
Historic cities like Lisbon don’t lend themselves to new units easily, which is an issue.
Airbnb OTOH is cancer to housing markets and pretty much every government should kill it.
If you’re really loaded, you can just buy your way into become a citizen of Malta an get your passport that way. I think Cyprus might also have a similar program:
https://www.citizenshipinvest.com/en/programs/malta-citizens...
https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/portugal-golden-visa-...
Also, can one bring a spouse?
But it seems weird to propose cutting the visas to help the housing crisis.
If there's a housing crisis then build more houses to increase supply, don't cripple the economy to reduce demand.
Increasing supply might negatively affect property values.
... And people influencing policy are likely property owners, or at least represent property owners.
There are news about landlord that throw out elder people to turn the house into airbnb
And about Golden Visa, they dont create jobs
But we are still frendly and welcome you all So make some vacations on Portugal leave some EURs ... and f*k off
Canada is a great example - lots of lovely policies, until you want to buy a condo.
(The cool thing about the Portugal program was you only needed to be present 7 days/yr, which means you could retain residency somewhere else, e.g. Puerto Rico, during the 6 year wait for permanent residency or the 7 year wait for citizenship. Real estate also doesn't have FATCA reporting, and thus isn't restricted from US persons; the fund investments, etc. are more annoying. The 250k EUR donation route is not actually that horrible IFF the citizenship is certain, but it does not seem to be certain.)
Caribbean CBI is $100-200k but is faster (6-12mo, easy) and doesn't include right to reside in Europe, but it's just from a marketing/aesthetic/brand perspective worse than Portugal. Turkey is another option, although it's USD 400k RE investment now, vs. USD 250k, and Turkey's current politics are...spicy, although I'm pretty bullish on Turkey as a country in >10 years (and sooner if changes happen.)
So, like Canada then?
uh...? no? That never happened.
GP is probably referring to one of those (maybe the more recent).
This person is just drive-by shit talking his ideological biases
Portugal has two times the population (10.4 million) and 125 times the space (92,200 square kilometers).
The problem isn't tourism (Airbnb) or retiree immigrants (golden visas) occupying Portugese residential units. The problem is inability to build the needed housing.
I can double an investment of 1€ easily; with 100 Million, it is a bit more difficult.
The problem is probably complex, and my bet is it has to do with incentives regarding tourism. When a desirable place gets an influx of people with a lot more purchase power than the locals, distortions happen. Prices, for instance, might reflect what tourists can pay, pricing out the locals. It is a delicate balance, and I guess it comes with globalization.
Let's try not ruin a beautiful country like Portugal by turning it into S'pore, aye?
by any measure (for example wealth, health, social security, safety, housing, jobs) Singapore is outranking most of Europe, including Portugal.
I lived there for a while, and I could go the rest of my life without ever even thinking of stepping foot into that depressing hole of a country again. These cute stats people like to throw around are nice and all in theory, but actually living there is a whole other story.
Maybe things have changed in the last 7 years since I last lived there, but I very much doubt it.
Also, at Singapore population density (I have different numbers from the other commenter), even if the entire EU moved there it would still be 42% untouched (and the rest of the EU would be empty).
The problem in Portugal is the relation between income and housing cost. If the average rent of a 1 bedroom is 1000/month, and the average net income is 1300/month, you have a problem.
And oh boy are they building. Entire new zones that didn't even exist 20 years ago are now full of high rise buildings, public transport, shopping malls, ... But the prices to live there are phenomenal, even to western european standards.
From a Portugal visa group I frequent (I'm looking at doing the golden visa in 2028 or so):
OK, so this article doesn't mention that these are proposals, which will be debated and then approved on March 16. I know the government has an absolute majority, but some changes may still happen. (One could reasonably infer from this article that it's a fait accompli.)
The article also only refers to a small part of a raft of proposed changes related to housing pressures, whose aim is to reduce the increasing unaffordability of housing, notably rental housing, for existing citizens/residents.
Many of the measures would not have a direct impact on members here, and available information is limited at the time of writing. However, key points (based on reliable Portuguese sources) include:
-Golden Visas - new GVs would not be issued in respect of property purchases, and conditions for renewal of existing GVs would be tightened (to be renewed only in the case of owner- or owners' children-occupied, or where rented on the long-term market).
-Alojamento Local - new AL licenses would not be issued, except in the rural interior where no urban pressures exist. Existing AL licenses would be re-evaluated in 2030, and every 5 years thereafter.
This is what I have been able to establish today on these points. There is no suggestion of retrospective action regarding existing approved GVs/AL licenses, until such time as they come up for renewal (or, in the case of AL licenses, are re-evaluated).
As a side note, GVs may still be available for investment in businesses and/or which lead to creation of jobs and/or in connection with some form of cultural sponsorship/investment, it seems - this is further outside of my field, so I can't say more on that point.
And all of this under a supposedly left-wing government.
https://shorttermrentalz.com/news/realpha-investment-homes/
https://skift.com/2022/02/16/avantstay-creates-a-500-million...
https://skift.com/2022/03/15/short-term-rentals-may-prove-ri...
http://insideairbnb.com/reports/platform-failures-how-short-...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u4s1fcync2gseyl/AirBnB_Report%20FI...
But the problem is even deeper, I recently spoke to a friend on the phone who considers to move to Portugal. He told me that if he rents out his apartment in L.A., he should get about 10,000 USD/mo for it. For that money he could literally rent a whole house in Portugal. How could Portuguese with an average salary below 1,000 USD compete with that on the housing market?
The woes Portuguese people are feeling now have been felt by the citizens of many countries before. Most of Europe considers its "first world" status as some kind of inherent property. You just need to look outside of Europe to Asia and Africa to see what's going to happen.
On the other hand construction regulations should be removed and government intervention lowered down so the market can fill the gaps by building like crazy.
Not just Portugal but Ireland, and of course Canada ended its wealthy visa class (Quebec pausing theirs) and BC brought in its foreign buyer and empty homes taxes.
For a while there it was clear that policy makers seemed to think that foreigners buying real estate was somehow a quick and easy way to turn around the economy. Somehow thinking foreign wealth merely being around would induce more wealth to appear as if by magic.
1. bring in a bunch of wealthy people to buy real estate
2. ???
3. Tide lifts all boats and economy does great!
Unfortunately what actually seems to happen is that you end up with a bunch of mostly empty pied-a-terres, the rich foreigners leverage the opportunity purely for a passport and don't invest or start new businesses, and the home building industry pivots increasingly toward building turn key pied-a-terres that are useless and expensive for locals.
It all results in a situation that's worse for the economy, a spiking cost of housing and living.
What policy makers should really be striving for here is an extremely low cost of renting which keeps money in peoples pockets that they spend and invest in creating their own local busineses.
Hopefully a Portuguese person who knows more can chime in here because I'm not really that familiar with the issue beyond the high level.
Due to it's climate, national parks and beaches, Sydney is one of the most desirable cities on the planet. As a result this has lead to sustained and very high (3% year on year) internal (rural/regional to city) and external migration.
In response to this migration, local governments close to the city center have done everything in their power for the last half century to oppose high density construction in any form, and to ensure that construction that does occur is not paired with adequate parks, walking/cycling routes, schools, transit, or external parking garages. Eastern suburb train stations in the 70's were protested and cancelled mid construction, and several new rail lines in the 80's and 90's have been cancelled due to thinly veiled race politics.
This has resulted in suburban sprawl and some of the worlds worst road congestion and gridlock that extends all the way to Sydney's periphery, and for 12+ hours per day during weekdays.
There’s some tax rules than incentivises investing in property, negative gearing, capital gains.
With Australians holding there wealth in property the government and their core voters don’t want to see property prices reduce,
Australia also has high immigration but not building despite population growth.
Australia is otherwise known as the “Lucky country”, its holding to its reputation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country
Property is the core investment most Australians make. So there’s zero political success in anything that would jeopardise house prices. See for example, the calls to sack the head of the RBA for raising rates “too quickly” (not quickly enough, and late).
There’s construction, of course, but it’s all either terribly built shoebox apartments that are still horribly expensive, in cities without the infrastructure to really make them work well, or luxury homes for those who had the good fortune to be born 20, 30, 40 years earlier than those trying to get a home now.
Add on top the fact we have frankly pretty bad renters rights, inflation plus rising rates and near zero vacancies plus profiteering have driven rents through the roof.
Negative gearing and other tax benefits distort the market further.
And because home owners are such a large and powerful proportion of the voting populace (which is the entire country as we have mandatory voting), and it’s an ageing population too so the young non-homeowners don’t outnumber them fully as a bloc, and you have political inaction as a near certainty.
It’s a recipe that’s been causing damage my entire life, but it’s not going to be solved anytime soon.
There was a town meeting and one owner of several buildings called in to complain that any regulation would hurt her business. She was calling while on vacation at Lake Como Italy. The sense of entitlement was thick.
Many so-called "reno-victions" are common. Oh that wall needs paint? Gotta evict you with 14 days notice. Good luck finding anywhere else to live since it's a 0.1% vacancy rate on a good day 0% most.
There's no damn breakfast either since there's no owner there it's just a way to get around paying the taxes that hotels do.
No. These schemes were mostly pandering to certain communities for votes.
Oh boy, you have no idea. That niche is about to explode in possibilities.
Yes. Look at Vancouver, Canada for a prime example.
I can't speak for the situation in Portugal as I don't live there. Maybe they have heaps of data, but when British Columbia was wrestling with a feeling that foreign buying was impacting the market, they literally were not collecting any data and so had nothing beyond vibes and anecdotes to go on.
The impact of foreign buyers was seemingly enough though for a major developer in Vancouver, Westbank, to start opening up sales offices in major Asian cities and was explicitly citing its condos as being ideal as pied-à-terres in their marketing materials. With that in mind, if entire major developers are shifting their entire business model, I have to imagine that the foreign buyer market was real and substantial.
The cities are fucked regardless with that level of incompetency.
Imagine your startup's problem is having too much money, and your CEO decides to fire the paying customers because it is too much money.
It is more like Portugal doesn't collect tax.
> taxing the sh*t out of airbnbs and empty property is one solution.
Let's not downplay it.
It is a much more superior solution.
The core of the issue is likely supply driven in most places - It makes no sense for an apartment that costs 300k to build to cost 500k-1m unless supply is constricted.
We should accommodate anyone who is willing to bring in the money.
There are tons of other better solutions. For example, why don't they just tax the shit out of Airbnb?
The "we earn too much money" problem is just straight up odd.
I wouldn't be surprised if similar things were happening in Lisbon.
So while you're absolutely right the problems can be solved by encouraging more housing construction, the solution is eroded when the developers themselves don't play along and aren't building a product that is relevant to locals.
After Vancouver added its various speculation taxes, Westbank closed its sales offices abroad and even went so far to go back to the city and have them go through a re-rezoning of projects already approved to change them from luxury condos to purpose built rentals.
"attracted 6.8B euros in investment since its launch in 2012"
6.8B / 11Y = 618M/y
Min inv = 280k
618M / 280k = 2207 GV houses sold/y
Avg amt sold/y = 150k
https://foreignbuyerswatch.com/2021/05/11/total-home-sales-i...
Golden visa share = 2k/150k = only 1%
Edit: Since I’m already being rate limited because I’m on dangs list because I argued with him…
It’s not easy for everyone to find new friends and romantic partners. Please don’t brush off the harsh realities of immigrating. My immigrant friends all tell me how hard it was to move to the US.
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/14/a-cool-destination-to-just-s...
Sincere question: Does anyone know how to differentiate between rise in real estate caused by a couple thousand Americans in a country of millions and the general inflation and rise in real estate being felt everywhere? I'm not fully convinced that a few thousand foreigners "ruined" Portugal, CDMX, and other such places. This seems more like a classic case of blame the foreigners, not our policies nationalism. The average digital nomad cannot afford to buy houses for cash in Europe.
Of course they are less wealthy - almost by definition - than the foreigners who take a lot of apartments.
I don't particularly care about Airbnbs, but the general problem of underbuilding (in cities proper) is enormous and most people don't even acknowledge it. :|
Me neither.
However, There's probably a lot more EU residents living part-time in Portugal than there are Americans. This most likely has a much bigger influence than a few American expats.
Let's also remember that Portugal (and Spain) were dictatorships not that long ago which would have severely crippled foreign investments. Their economies are nowhere where they would be had they been stable democracies but are on the right direction playing catch-up with the rest of Europe. Poland and Romania are on a similar trajectory after having their development and growth stunted by decades of communism.
It’s a phenomenon seen time and time again with AirBnb and to be honest is the way the US government eliminated SROs and tenaments without windows etc. Section 8 vouchers drove up rents for conformant apartments.
Chinese nationals account for half of all golden visas issued in Portugal. It is the same capital outflow that is ruining real estate markets worldwide.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-16/portugal-...
Picking on the portion of those that went to Chinese nationals is just an irrelevant detail.
I also have a sneaky suspicion that some/perhaps many Portuguese are actually doing pretty well, and are thus collectively suffering the same 'affluenza', stoked by zero interest rates, as the rest of us.
It is so weird to read this, when Portugal used to be a major colonial power.
Times, they have a-changed...
Portugal got out of its funk when a vaguely fascist dictator took over. Salazar.
He sacrificed prosperity and liberty to achieve stability, which was a good deal because Portugal didn’t have much prosperity or liberty.
The last of Portugals overseas (non-Atlantic) territory’s was ceded to China in 2000.
It’s been a long, strange trip for Portugal, but they haven’t been a wealthy empire since they gifted Mumbai to the British.
Perhaps there's a sense that land claimed through overwhelming advantage was not a fair fight and thus any gains should be returned?
All of them sucked, for someone or another, but ended up making us who we are, today, for better or worse.
In the US, we celebrate the War of Independence (American Revolution), where we threw off the yoke of British tyranny.
But there are some black folks, and native Americans, that maybe didn't get too much benefit from the war.
The Romans probably did more for diversifying the genetics and cultures of Europe and Western Asia, than anyone, from their brutality. The Chinese feudal system was so vicious, that it made the European one look like a day at Disneyland, but they also developed some important technological advancements.
The Aztecs and Incas were ... not exactly gentle ... to their neighbors, but established some pretty significant civilizations (that the Spanish then took apart). They didn't even have horses.
We have flamenco music, because the Moors conquered Spain.
... and so on ...
I'm really hoping that we may finally be seeing an end to one nation just reaching out and grabbing another one. Ukraine may be the last gasp of that. It may not be the end, however, of nations splitting into smaller ones.
China's per capita GDP is ~$12k.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-rea...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrati...
And to clarify, Beijing and Shanghai are not provinces, they are cities. They are two of the four mainland Chinese cities “promoted” to the province level politically, but they are cities. Basically it would be as if Washington DC was a state. The other two cities like this are Chongqing and Tianjin.
Something similar also happened to Spain.
But more seriously, (good) human activity creates wealth - wealth being 'a better world' or 'nice things' or 'human happiness' or 'peace' or 'more toys' or the many other ways of understanding it.
Capital is an agglomeration of wealth employed to create more wealth - however without human activity and human direction it can do nothing, instead it amplifies such activity and direction. Furthermore, as society moves to post-industrialisation, the most important wealth creation will require much less capital investment, and much more human effectiveness.
In a capitalist society, wealth holders are trusted to direct capital more nimbly and effectively (for ~50% of the economy in modern economies) than the state. As such, they can be understood as creating wealth too. However, it is a simple matter for them to delegate to wealth managers, while creaming off an over-sized share of the proceeds. The trick then is to replace wealth holders with commonly beneficial capital ownership vehicles - i.e. pensions and sovereign wealth funds, while keeping a lid on the wilder excesses of the appointed wealth managers.
So weird hearing that because when I was growing up in the 80s Japan was famous for having the most unaffordable property anywhere in the world. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/309...