EU wants answers over who is investing in real estate in Lisbon and Porto

 In News

The European Commission has sponsored a study which seeks to understand how the residential housing sector is financed in Lisbon and Porto and how this is changing the profile of the two cities.

The scientific report covers the way developments are financed in eight European cities, including Lisbon and Porto in order to get a better grasp of how far the presence of big international investors in Lisbon and Porto is involved in national projects and if they are national, international, private or institutional.
The next step will be to cross reference information with measures that have been or will be implemented and then discussed in a case-by-case basis.
The study is being undertaken by the EC’s Joint Research Centre and also involves Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, Porto and Vilnius.
Ricardo Barranco, researcher for the organisation which is based in Ispra, Italy, the results could be very revealing in defining new policies.
“During this project we have already realised that rising home prices is a generalised phenomena with various causal factors and that bringing them back to affordable levels is not a simple task or even common to all the cities in the project” he said.