House prices in Portugal break record per square meter – 21/04/2023 – Market

House prices in Portugal reached a new historic high last year. At the end of 2022, the median price of housing was already 1,500 euros (about R$ 8,300, at the current exchange rate) per square meter, the highest value on record.

Even so, in most large cities, price increases are slowing down, although sharp rises continue to be recorded in all these municipalities.

The data, published this Friday (21), are from the INE (National Institute of Statistics, the Portuguese IBGE), which reports that, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the median value of housing sales in Portugal represents an increase of 10.7% in relation to the same period of the previous year.

Despite the double-digit rise, there is a slight slowdown compared to the third quarter of 2022, when prices had increased by more than 13%.

Considering the year 2022 as a whole, the median house price thus stood at 1,484 euros per square meter, an increase of more than 14% compared to the values ​​that were registered in 2021. Here too, this is the annual value highest on record.

As has been happening in recent years, there are four regions where prices are significantly higher than the median for the rest of the country: in 2022 as a whole, the median house price stood at 2,339 euros per square meter in the Algarve, 2,096 euros per square meter in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, 1,607 euros per square meter in the Porto Metropolitan Area and 1,571 euros per square meter in the Autonomous Region of Madeira.

INE also identifies 47 municipalities with values ​​above the national median, most of which are located in the Algarve and in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The most expensive municipality in Portugal to buy a house continues to be the capital, where the sale price of houses reached 3,872 euros per square meter last year as a whole, an increase of close to 10% compared to the previous year.

Despite these sharp rises, INE sees a deceleration in growth at the end of the year, not only in the country as a whole, but also in most large cities, where the highest prices are found. Considering only the fourth quarter of 2022, price increases slowed down in 14 of the country’s 24 municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, although price increases continued to be seen in all of them (and, in most cases, to two digits).

After Lisbon (which, taking only the last quarter of 2022 into account, already registers a median value of 4,022 euros per square meter), it is Cascais that presents the highest values ​​(3,631 euros per square meter in the fourth quarter of 2022 and 3,473 euros per square meter for the year as a whole), followed by Oeiras, also with values ​​above 3,000 euros per square meter.

Foreigners pay 1.5 times more

Contributing to the rise in house prices were also foreign buyers, who pay significantly higher prices than domestic ones.

Last year, the median value of sales of family accommodation purchased by people with tax domicile in the national territory was 1,454 euros per square meter, while the median price paid by buyers with tax domicile abroad was around 1.5 times higher, settling at 2,237 euros per square meter.

This discrepancy becomes smaller in large cities, where nationals also pay values ​​higher than the national median. In Lisbon, for example, national buyers paid 3,768 euros per square meter for houses, while foreigners paid a median of 5,357 euros per square meter, an amount around 1.4 times higher than nationals.

Also in Porto, the difference is of this dimension: last year, nationals paid a median of 2,524 euros per square meter for houses bought in this city, while foreigners spent 3,560 euros per square meter.