Local Accommodation owners refuse long-term rentals

Owners of private guest houses rented out to tourists as Local Accommodation have snubbed the government by refusing to long-lease their premises to local families.

Most of those who own apartments of a block of apartments to rent out to city-break tourists in Lisbon and Porto say that if they have to give up their businesses, they would rather prefer to use their properties for own-use holiday homes or even sell the property.
This is the conclusion of a preliminary analysis of a survey carried out this month with ‘economic agents’ as part of a study LA undertaken by Nova SBE which studied 1,820 replies from LA owners and management firms that deal with renting out their clients’ properties to tourists and short let tenants.
The majority of those quizzed say that if they can no longer use their current property as an LA guest house because of the new rules for the sector resulting from the government’s More Housing’ programme unveiled on February 16, they will probably use the property “only in the holidays”, “rent it out to foreigners” on a longer lease or “sell the property”.
Only 15% of those canvassed said they were prepared to rent out their properties on a long 3-year lease to students delegates heard at a conference held on Tuesday organised by the Local Accommodation Association in Portugal. (ALEP)
Most of those who responded to the survey were men (57%) with academic qualifications higher than the national average (75%), many with university education. Some 51% had just one LA property, and just 9% had five or more properties rented out to tourists.
In 76% of cases, those surveyed managed their properties themselves, of which 66% ran their businesses as entrepreneurs in own name.