Housing market
27 June 2021
Statistics Portugal has just published the latest series of its Housing Price Index (Q1 2021). This document allows us, quarter after quarter, to follow the evolution of:
– the housing price index in Portugal;
– number of house transactions nationwide.
Graph 1 – Quarterly rate of change of the House Price Index
As you can see in Graph 1, in general – and this note is very relevant, summarizing the evolution of the residential market for an entire country necessarily implies ignoring a series of different realities – the price of houses in Portugal continues to rise consistent, quarter after quarter.
Graph 2 – Evolution of the number of residential transactions in Portugal.
Since 2019, the number of transactions has remained relatively stable. But this stability is kept at record numbers. Although, of course, the effects of the pandemic are impossible to mitigate in the current context. In summary: there is an inversely proportional relationship between the number of restrictions to which the country is subject and the number of transactions. The closer we are to a situation of full lockdown, the fewer the number of transactions (the orange column of Graph 2 refers to the 2nd quarter of 2020, the most affected by the first lockdown).
Note that in the 4th quarter of 2020 a new record number of transactions was established in a quarter (49,734). And it was less than four years ago (in the 4th quarter of 2017) that the 40,000 transactions per quarter had been exceeded for the first time (42,445).
