Number of homes on the market at 15-year lows

It has been 15 years since there were so few homes for sale on the market in Portugal (Mainland). 2022 closed with a record of residential supply of 47,200 homes for sale, and of the supply accounted for in the last quarter of the year, 17,600 are new homes and 29,600 are used.

According to Confidencial Imobiliário's SIR-Residential Information System database, this is the lowest quarterly offer volume since mid-2007, consolidating two years of successive reductions in the portfolio of homes available for sale in the country. These 47,200 homes are 25% below the levels observed at the start of 2021, when 63,000 units were on the market.

Ricardo Guimarães, director of Confidencial Imobiliário, comments that «the tendency to reduce supply has been visible in both new and used housing, reflecting the double circumstance of low replacement capacity for new products and expanding demand, which it has also resulted in a high rate of absorption of existing fires».

According to Ricardo Guimarães, «this lack of structural supply continues to be one of the main reasons why the rate of appreciation remains so high».

Offer reduces more in metropolitan areas

The Metropolitan Areas of Lisbon and Porto are those that register the greatest reduction in housing supply. In the last quarter of last year, companies participating in the SIR reported a total of 20,700 homes on offer in the Lisbon region, another 15-year minimum, which contrasts with a stock of 29,000 homes registered two years earlier and less than half the standards of this market between 2009 and 2010, when the stock on offer exceeded 50,000 units.

In the Porto region, in the 4th quarter, the volume of supply totaled just over 7,000 homes, close to the value recorded in mid-2019. A geography that has registered a less consistent behavior than Lisbon, with fluctuations over the quarters between reduction and expansion, but the reality of the market is also quite different from recent years: between 2009 and 2012, the Metropolitan Area of Porto had more than 20,000 dwellings per quarter on offer.

Source: Vida Imobiliária