Posts categorized under Real Estate

While beneficial for the economic recovery of Portugal, the rising trend as a tourist destination can also generate negative impacts in the population. One important concern is the rising costs of housing, particularly in the city centers. The authors collected data for the period 2011-2014 on Airbnb presence, house prices and rents to quantify the impact of Airbnb’s short-term rentals on housing affordability in Portugal. Caption: Transaction Prices, in €/m2, in civil parishes within Lisbon and Porto.

This paper analyzes housing rental rates at the parish level within municipalities. The analysis explores spatial patterns of housing rents in 4049 Portuguese parishes across 278 municipalities using data from the 2011 Population and Housing Census from the Portuguese National Institute for Statistics. Housing rental rates tend to be higher in parishes with greater population density (measured by the number of citizens living per square kilometer), a higher number of dwellings, and greater potential sustainability (measured as the ratio of working-age population-between 15 and 64 years-to elderly population-aged 65 and over), better mobility (measured as resident population employed outside the territorial unit plus employed non-resident population in the territorial unit divided by employed resident population), and a higher social-diversity ratio (measured as a weighted average of each socioeconomic group), besides the dwelling’s useful area in square meters.

Household indebtedness in Portugal has drastically increased in the last 30 years, with households’ indebtedness at around 20 per cent of disposable income in 1990 increasing to 118 per cent of disposable income in 2004. Some of this indebtedness is due an increased demand for housing. For a while rental rates were frozen, disincentivizing the rental market, while successive Portuguese governments helped low-income households into housing through the Crédito Bonificado program.

Increases in house prices are known to stimulate households’ consumption. Since residential property is an illiquid asset, households may have to increase debt to adjust their current expenditure to their new perceived wealth. This study is particularly relevant given the recent significant rise in property values in Portugal pre COVID-19. This paper relies on microdata retrieved from the first wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey to examine the response of household debt to households’ perception of their residential properties’prices.

A correspondence-based field experiment was carried out in the Portuguese housing market to determine whether same-sex couples are treated differently than opposite-sex couples. This is the first study of its type to explore the relation between discrimination and religiosity. In this experiment, fictitious couples replied to real housing ads in the metropolitan areas of Porto and Lisbon via e-mail. The applicants are portrayed as married, having stable income and professions. Some of them are opposite-sex couples, others same-sex couples (female or male).

This paper addresses the question of whether increased energy efficiency, as measured by the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), has an impact on the transaction price of residential properties in Portugal. The investigation of the relationship between the EPC label and residential property prices is carried out through the econometric estimation of an hedonic price model, which has been used as the workhorse model of house prices. Using a dataset of 256,000 residential property sales for Portugal, this paper estimates a price premium for energy efficiency.

Historic cities are identifiable through their iconic monuments and buildings. Location relative to these structures generate premiums in the housing market. We examine the impact of such historic amenities on housing prices in Lisbon, Portugal. Results reveal heterogeneous impacts from different types of monuments. Churches, palaces and stone architecture have their own unique impact on the market and landmarks generate the highest premiums. Residents value living in proximity to a non-landmark church (yielding a premium of 4.