Planning Processes

The number of buildings licensed in the first quarter fell by 10.9%, to 6,500 buildings, compared to the same period last year, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE). In a note [...]

Municipal Council licensing departments received applications for the licensing of 11,400 new housing projects for mainland Portugal in the first half of 2025. This is added to a future potential [...]

A significant slice of new apartments, whose applications for planning permission have been submitted to municipal councils in Portugal over the past 5 years, have yet to receive planning [...]

In a bid to speed up Portugal’s notoriously slow and bureaucratic planning permission procedures, municipal councils have been given 200 days to decide whether to issue licences or not. The time [...]

The majority of Portuguese (57.8%) wait a year or more to get planning permission for building projects according to a survey carried out by online estate agents Imovendo. The company quizzed [...]

Entrepreneurs in Porto have called on authorities and municipal councils to cut the amount of red tape and time taken in approving real estate investments so that investors can invest quickly and [...]

Clearing a large part of planning licensing backlog piled up in municipal councils, setting clear rules on timeframes, certificating tacit deferrals, and streamlining and simplifying the hundreds [...]

Lisbon’s City Council’s planning chief has pledged to speed up the time it takes for the municipal council to deal with planning applications, the slowness of which has been a bugbear for over 20 [...]

Some projects in Lisbon are taking five years or more to receive planning permission from Lisbon City Council. A report by Jornal Económico tells of developers which are exasperated over delays [...]