Lisbon has almost 48,000 empty houses

Almost 48,000 houses in Lisbon are not identified as a main or secondary residence by the owners and are empty, a Councillor of the Lisbon Municipal Council has declared.

The Portuguese daily Correio da Manhã, quoting the councillor for Housing at the Lisbon Municipal Council Filipa Roseta, indicated that the number of vacant houses in Lisbon was a “huge number”.

Explaining that the LMC plans to leverage these valuable assets, Roseta said, "We have to put the vacant buildings to use, we have to put the public ones, we have to put the private ones.”

Speaking at joint hearing of the 1st and of the 2nd committees of the Lisbon Municipal Assembly on the 2022 budget proposal of the municipal executive in the area of ​​urban planning, the Councillor admitting that the number of vacant units was huge and said "Our mission at the Municipal Council [of Housing] is to understand how we are going to invite the owners of this universe of almost 48 thousand houses to come to the game".

Nearly two thousand of these houses are owned the Lisbon Municipal Council.

The councillor stated, in response to questions from municipal deputies, that the Chamber is "doing a job" to "understand what these 48 thousand dwellings are" and considered that the Municipal Housing Council, reactivated by this executive, and that it should having the first meeting in February, "will be fundamental for this" and to "encourage private individuals to put their houses on the market". "This is extremely important", thundered the PSD councillor.

Roseta also reminded that the Lisbon Municipal Council owns 2,000 of these vacant houses and said that their rehabilitation and placement on the city's housing market are "the urgent mission" and "immediate responsibility" of the municipality.

In the meanwhile, it has been noted that more than half of the houses registered with the Finance Department in Portugal are valued at less than £42,000 a report has revealed.

According to Jornal de Notícias, citing data from the Ministério das Finanças (Ministry of Finance), over fifty percent of the properties registered with the Department of Finance in Portugal and located in the interior regions of the country are worth, in terms of their patrimonial value less than €50,000 euros (GBP 41,857). However, the market value of most of these properties are much higher.

Majority of the properties in Portugal located in in the interior regions of the country are worth less than £42,000.

The report in the Portuguese daily further suggests that out of the 6.5 million homes registered across the country, nearly 52 percent (equating to nearly 3.4 million have a taxable asset value below €50,000 which are predominantly located in the inland areas such as Corvo and Alcoutim and Mértola, towns in southeastern Portugal near the Portugal–Spain border.

Conversely, the records of the Finance department also show that 2,937 houses are worth more than one million euros, distributed across 132 of the 308 municipalities in the country. Most are located in the municipalities of Lisbon (714), Cascais (395) and Loulé (326).

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