Immigration vital for Portugal’s construction sector says APPII

The CEO of Portugal’s Association of Real Estate Developers and Investors (APPII) has warned there is a “long road ahead” before the country’s housing market stabilises, ending a continuous cycle of rising residential property prices.

Manuel Maria Gonçalves says that the country needs around 300,000 new houses and the workforce to build them which inevitably means bringing in overseas workers.

The APPII disagrees with the conclusions made last Monday by the Bank of Portugal (BdP), which sees “a stabilisation of pressures” on house prices caused by a slowdown in immigration, but also by an increase in the supply of new housing.

The percentage of foreign workers rose from 5.5% in 2010 to 10% in 2019 and reached 32% in 2025. Between 2019 and 2025, the total number of employees registered with social security increased by 42% in the construction sector, compared to 21% in the private sector as a whole, according to BdP data.

“Unfortunately, the price stabilisation that the country needs has not yet been achieved. We still have a long way to go, and immigration is fundamental to the sector. The less skilled immigration there is for this sector, the higher the prices will be, and the more expensive the labour will be,” Manuel Maria Gonçalves, CEO of APPII, told the news source Jornal Ecónomico.

The analysis conducted by the regulator led by Álvaro Santos Pereira identifies a deficit of 300,000 homes, equivalent to the entire municipality of Lisbon or all existing housing in the municipalities of Beja, Bragança, Castelo Branco, Évora, Faro, Guarda, Santarém, Vila Real, and Viseu. An “impressive number that should make us reflect and act,” the report states.

For the CEO of APPII, this number “has ceased to be a narrative of the private sector and has become a public policy objective,” and he points to the next four or five years as the timeframe needed to build the 300,000 homes.

Source: Jornal Económico