Finangeste – a driver in business relocation and new urban housing developments

 In News, Original

Finangeste, Portugal’s oldest loan servicing and real estate asset management company, has large and ambitious urban redevelopment plans for key Portuguese cities.  

In an interview with Essential Business, marking Finangeste’s 40th anniversary, CEO Paul Henri Schelfhout says that systemic bad investment issues will “disappear from the Portuguese market” and be replaced with new urban community developments aimed at attracting international company relocation. 

A driver for business relocation

“Bringing business to Portugal is about creating the right conditions. People don’t want to relocate and not have office space to occupy and homes in which to live” says Schelfhout.

“Unless you have the infrastructure in place to provide housing, office space and all the right conditions, companies are not going to move here. Even in Dublin there’s no housing in the city. Everyone is “Brexiting” and looking to relocate and where are the going to go? Lisbon is one of the prime candidates”. 

“We have to be three years before the trend to prepare the sites and locations so that two years later we can offer the market the opportunity to move here and that means focusing on very large-scale developments” he explains. 

New metropolitan redevelopment projects

Schelfhout says land is needed in and around large metropolitan areas where you can build a city. 

“We’ve been focusing on this for about three years. We have massive projects on the South side of the river for low-income families in Lisbon South Bay (Seixal, Almada and Barreiro). We’re also expanding very heavily into Loures, Sacavém, the Expo area of Lisbon for corporates moving to the Western corridor because Lisbon is getting full.

Finangeste is also focusing on peripheral cities like Faro where it has huge projects for Faro and a massive urban redevelopment project for Caldas da Rainha. “There’s nowhere to put people and there’s the demand,” he says.

“We’re doing about 250 branded units in Caldas in an old dilapidated building which will be refurbished with the support of the local authority. 

In Figueira de Foz too, Finangeste has a large profile and is seen as the company that comes into cities, takes over all the white elephants and systematically clean them up and repackages and repositions them.

“You’re going to see a lot of systemic bad investment issues evaporating from the Portuguese market through a lot of combined effort from companies like Finangeste and others” concludes Paul Henry Schelfhout.