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    Thinking of Buying a Home in Portugal? The Government Just Made It More Expensive

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    Portugal has long been popular among travelers, and in recent years, it’s become a hotspot for foreign, high-net-worth homebuyers, too. But that’s about to change.

    This month, the Portuguese government announced its plans to end its special tax regime for non-habitual residents starting in 2024. Under the current NHR program, qualifying individuals who live in the country at least part-time enjoy tax exemptions for up to 10 years on income earned in Portugal and are also exempt from paying taxes on their global earnings. Additionally, in February, Portugal also said it would be pulling the plug on its golden visa program over concerns that wealthy expats were causing property prices to rise.  

    “We already have clients that are looking to reconsider their plans,” Alex Ingrim, a private wealth manager and senior investment analyst at Chase Buchanan, told Business Insider. “I think it’s caused a lot of people to reconsider why they were moving to Portugal if it’s not going to be as easy as they first thought.” The good news is that Americans and other foreigners who are already living in Portugal will still keep their tax benefits through the duration of their 10-year term.

    Portugal announced that in 2024 it will be ending its Non-Habitual Residency tax regime for new entrants.

    Unsplash/Louis Droege

    As of 2022, there were approximately 10,000 Americans living in Portugal. Per the New York Times, that’s a whopping 239 percent increase since 2017. According to a recent report from the Property-Market Index, home values throughout the country spiked 6.5 percent over the last year due to the country’s inability to keep up with demand.  

    In the Algarve region specifically, prices rose 15 percent in the same period, with cities like Lisbon experiencing similar surges. At Quinta do Lago, a golf community on the Algarve coast, prices have jumped over 28 percent since 2020, and the research firm estimated that values will climb by 19 percent by 2025.

    “It’s causing people to take a step back and go, ‘Okay, Portugal was the easy answer, and now there’s no other easy answer out there. France, Italy, or Spain might be back on the table,’” Ingrim told Insider. More

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      Second Home’s Rohan Silva on the Lisbon tech boom – and his plans for expansion

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      Second Home co-founder Rohan Silva. Courtesy of Second HomeWorkspace innovator Second Home has announced it will invest an eight-figure sum in a second Lisbon base, a 6,000sq m space spread over three buildings due to open in 2019.
      The second hub will be five times larger than company’s existing Lisbon venue and will cater for both global companies looking for a Portuguese base and to local firms, with spaces ranging from communal shared desks to large private studios.
      Second Home Lisboa opened inside the 19th-century Mercado da Ribeira earlier this year. Photography: Iwan Baan
      ‘Lisbon is moving from a start-up phase to a scale-up economy,’ says Second Home co-founder Rohan Silva. ‘To date the focus in the city has been on providing infrastructure, training and funding to startups but now it’s time to build an ecosystem that supports growth. Our second space is part of that next step for the city.’
      Portugal’s economy expanded 3% in the second quarter of 2017, compared with the same period in 2016 and unemployment is now 8.5%, below the EU average. The city’s start-up kudos also continues to grow. This month’s WebSummit tech conference, which brought the equivalent of €200 million in revenue to Lisbon in 2015, attracted more than 62,000 attendees and is helping to drive Lisbon onto the international corporate radar. Mercedes Benz, VICE and Volkswagen are just some of the companies now based at Second Home in Lisbon and the company has already secured interest from ‘one of the world’s biggest high street retailers’ for its next Lisbon office, says Silva.
      Second Home Lisboa designed by SelgasCano. The group’s second Lisbon outpost will also be designed by the Spanish firm. Photography: Iwan Baan
      The firm will work with its regular architect, Spanish firm SelgasCano, on the project, which will also include a restaurant, a 200-seat venue for talks and events and a Portuguese and English language bookshop, all open to the public.
      ‘There are outdoor spaces and courtyards and we are planting trees. We want to keep the same design ethos of biophilia and lots of natural light. It’s going to be a campus that feels like real oasis.’

      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Photography: Iwan Baan

      Rising property prices in Lisbon are helping to drive companies towards shared spaces: since the nadir of 2012, the price of property in the city has increased by 35%. In upmarket suburb of Chiado, you can now expect to pay around €10,000 per sq metre, though the average in the city is closer to €2,500 per sq metre.
      ‘In five years’ time Lisbon won’t be the fashionable city that it is today but I think it will continue to be a city where companies and people can be successful and innovative,’ says Silva. ‘We need to use this moment of attention to focus on making the city structurally better, a place where global companies can land and grow but also where there is fair, equal access to opportunity for the people who live here.’
      The new Lisbon space will be the company’s seventh: a fourth London office opens next year and a Los Angeles venue launches in the first quarter of 2019.
      Read next: 5 Lisbon properties for sale with commercial potential More

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      Second Home Lisboa: inside the creative accelerator’s first international outpost

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      ‘We want to encourage serendipitous meetings and the clustering of different types of business,’ says Second Home co-founder Rohan Silva. ‘That’s how we believe creativity and innovation happens.’
      The tech entrepreneur has applied this mantra to two spaces in London so far, and now he’s exporting it to Portugal. Second Home Lisboa has just opened inside the storied 19th-century Mercado da Ribeira.
      Spanish practice SelgasCano – who also designed Second Home’s 25,000 sq ft east London space, as well as its bookshop Libreria – created the hub’s colourful interiors, which have been treated to a healthy dose of Yves Klein Blue and a plethora of plants.
      Second Home bills itself as the future of the workspace, offering up in-house restaurants, cultural programming and yoga and meditation spaces to its diverse mix of tech and creative sector entrepreneurs. We spoke to Rohan Silva about the move to the Portuguese capital, what makes Second Home Lisboa tick and how the workplace is changing.

      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Photography: Iwan Baan

      Why did you choose to expand to Lisbon?Rohan Silva: It was a business decision but it was a mix of head and heart. I first visited Lisbon three years ago and really liked it here. It reminds me of east London in 2010, before the Tech City explosion. There is energy, creativity and a real mix of businesses, from venture capitalists to film-makers, fashion designers and creative agencies. It’s much more than just tech. And that suits the Second Home profile; we aim to curate a mix of different industries in the space.
      Tell us about the Lisbon space.RS: Second Home Lisboa is on top of the city’s 19th century market hall and our offices overlook the fruit and vegetable vendors below. The building is an open, vaulting space and our architects, Spanish firm Selgas Cano, have respected that. There is a lot of natural light flooding in and we’ve used more than 1,000 plants and trees to demarcate spaces inside and to create privacy.
      This is a very eco-friendly building, too, with features like natural ventilation. There will be a well being space, an in-house restaurant headed up by Spanish chef Francis Paniego and a cultural programme of talks and so on.
      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Lisbon shares the same architects and some of the same features as the London space, but in what ways is it different from the London venue?RS: In some small details it’s different – rather than the bookshop we have in London, in Lisbon we will have a lending library for members, with books in English and Portuguese. And the physicality of the space is very different to London too. But overall the intent is absolutely the same.
      Looking at the way we work more generally, is co-working as a concept still relevant today?RS: Co-working is absolutely still relevant. Desk spaces are a utility and an increasingly important one. Freelance workers are a very fast growing segment of the economy; in the US, 20 per cent of the workforce is already freelance or self-employed and in the UK there will be more freelancers than public servants by 2018. There aren’t enough spaces for people working this way; there need to be a lot more.
      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Where does Second Home sit within the coworking concept?RS: We don’t consider ourselves a coworking space because, generally, as long as you pay for a desk you can work one of these. We curate the companies that work at Second Home and our focus is squarely on creativity, innovation and how to support it and make it happen. I think we are a new species of thing: a creative accelerator.
      What do you think the workplace will look like in 10 years time?RS: I think some of the things we are doing at Second Home now will become more common. Cultural programming for instance: people want to be inspired in the place where they work. There’ll be more of an emphasis on well-being, spaces and time for yoga and meditation. And physical design is important too; a building can really shape us. Our architects look at evolutionary psychology – which considers how humans adapt to the changing the world – and biophilia, which studies the affinity people have with the natural world, and create buildings that mimic and take aspects from nature. There are no straight lines in our buildings and lots of natural light, for example. I think we’ll see more of that in future, a focus on nature.
      Photography: Iwan Baan
      Other than Lisbon, what’s next for Second Home?RS: Our next project is a family-friendly space opening in London Fields in spring 2017. It will have facilities geared at people with young children, including everything from a bilingual English Mandarin nursery to spaces for kids to park their scooters. That’s another trend I think we’ll see a lot more of in the future – child-friendly work spaces.
      We’re also planning to open another space in Holland Park later in 2017, in John Cowan’s former photography studio. It’s the space that was used in the 1960s movie Blow Up and we just fell in love with the building. Also, there’s a bit of an imbalance in London at the moment. All cultural energy has moved to the east at the expense of the west. We’re looking to address that, albeit in a small way.
      Read next: Inside Lisbon’s tech and co-working scene More

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      Inside Lisbon’s booming coworking and tech scene

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      Lisbon is rapidly becoming known as the California of Europe. The similarities stretch further than just its west coast location and great surf: the city is also starting to compete with Silicon Valley in attracting startups and entrepreneurs.
      Last month the Portuguese capital was included in WIRED’s list of hottest start-up destinations for the first time, an acknowledgement that the number of tech and creative companies based in the city is growing fast. Over the last five years, 40 Portugal-based startups have raised more than $166 million in funding.
      Pictured: An event space inside Lisbon WorkHub, which took over the old Abel Pereira da Fonseca wine warehouse.
      While much of the impetus comes from local entrepreneurs, international investors are also making their homes in the city. Foreigners accounted for 90% of the €730 million invested in Portuguese real estate last year, nearly three times the amount for 2013.
      While enterprises are committing long term, others are digital nomads basing themselves in Lisbon for a few weeks or months. But all of them are looking for interesting spaces in which to work, and to cater for this growth, a number of new co-working spaces are popping in the city.
      Second Home Lisboa will open above Mercado da Ribeira in December. Photography: Courtesy of Second Home
      NOW, a 4,000 sq m shared workspace – set to be the largest in Lisbon – aims to open in November in the Beato area to the east of the city. The following month sees London based Second Home open its first international space in the city’s historic centre, Cais do Sodre. Another British coworking brand Ministry of Startups is also considering a new space in Lisbon, choosing the Portuguese capital over destinations such as Tel Aviv and Berlin.
      Even Lisbon’s city council is getting in on the act, releasing the former Manutenção Militar factory to serve as a creative hub. As well as acting as an incubator, it will host the administrative offices of Web Summit, which promises to draw some 50,000 more entrepreneurs to the city this month when it holds its annual tech conference at the Feira Internacional de Lisboa.
      Manutenção Militar Complex or MMC was an industrial facility that produced food, uniforms and other goods for the Portuguese Army. Photography: DOCOMOMO International
      ‘Lisbon is the place to be now,’ says Peter Faber, co-founder of Surf Office, a coworking space where members can live on site. ‘A lot of interesting people are moving here and starting new projects; there are a lot of things happening.’
      Coworklisboa-founder Fernando Mendes – and the man behind NOW – agrees with Faber. ‘This is the best country to be right now. Portuguese people love to receive new comers. Add in sun, beaches, safety, good food and you have the secret of our success.’

      Mendes says that 30% of the companies that use Coworklisboa’s spaces are from abroad, up from just 5% in 2010. Reflecting that, NOW will also offer living spaces alongside its shared work areas.
      ‘NOW is much more than an incubator or co-working space. It’s being designed to accommodate new services to better support the huge wave of entrepreneurs we expect will be coming to the city in the next few years. We’ll have all the dimensions, to support everything from the nomadic freelancer to digital startup and designer makers,’ says Mendes.
      5 Lisbon coworking spaces and tech hubs you should know
      NOW
      Now is the biggest proposed co-working space in Lisbon and is scheduled to open in November. Spanning 4,000 sq m, it will include living spaces alongside shared work areas and studio spaces. The project also has a community focus and will boost shared learning among members.
      Second Home Lisboa
      Architect’s visualisation of Second Home Lisboa. Courtesy of Second Home
      Second Home’s Lisbon outpost is slated to open in early December and will be located above Mercardo da Ribeira – a vibrant food court and market near the river. With interiors designed by award-winning Spanish architects Selgas Cano, creators of the brand’s original London space and the 2015 Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion, Second Home Lisboa will feature a bookshop, cafe and bar that hosts cultural events.
      Surf Office
      Photography: Surf Office
      If you’re looking for a short term space to live, work and play, Surf Office could be the answer. Centrally located in Cais do Sodre, the city’s party zone, Surf Office has rooms to rent from €60 per night and the space comes with a shared workspace, super fast wifi, break-out rooms and a lounge. Companies from 2 to 20 people can hire the rooms by the night if they want to take a break from their usual location. Surf trips are optional!
      Lisbon WorkHub
      Photography: Lisbon WorkHub
      Situated in the east of Lisbon in Poco do Bispo – an area rapidly becoming the city’s Shoreditch – Lisbon WorkHub is based in one of the most striking buildings in the area: the former Abel Pereira da Fonseca wine warehouse. It features two vast 5-metre-tall circular windows overlooking a pretty tree-shaded square below. Desk spaces are available from €120 per month with events spaces, and private offices from €500 per month.
      Todos
      Photography: Todos
      Also in Poco do Bispo, this 1,600 sq m creative hub focuses on multi-media, film and photography. It interviews all applicants for suitability. Todos offers 40 sq m studio spaces for rent from €400/month, and also has a 17m x 9m photography studio, editing and post production suite, fitting rooms and meeting spaces.
      Read next: Why Lisbon’s startup scene will hit full throttle in 2016 More

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      Why Lisbon’s startup scene will hit full throttle in 2016

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      There’s no shortage of startup ‘scenes’ being talked about these days. Whether it’s in European hotspots like London, Berlin, and Barcelona, or the tech world’s spiritual home in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship has scarcely been this popular since the days of the Silk Road.
      One city flying under the radar is Lisbon – but that’s set to change in 2016. News that popular London co-working space Second Home will expand to the Portuguese capital this May follows an announcement that the Web Summit conference (to the startup world what CES is to oversized TVs) will relocate from Dublin to Lisbon in November.
      Also set to land is the first Portuguese outpost of Impact Hub, whose global network of socially-minded co-working spaces spans some 70 cities. Opening in June, it will take over an abandoned pavilion in the Beato Marvila district, with desk rentals on offer for up to 300 entrepreneurs for a paltry €80 euros a month.
      But Lisbon isn’t just about what’s coming. Web Summit and Impact Hub will join existing local startup events like the Lisbon Investment Summit, and sit alongside incubators including Startup Lisboa. Influential venture capitalist firms are also rooted in Lisbon, such as Caixa Capital – an off-shoot of Portugal’s largest bank – rounding-out the city’s growing startup ecosystem.
      Web Summit’s arrival will shine the international spotlight on Lisbon, but it already has a burgeoning tech scene. So why Lisbon, and why now for companies like Web Summit and Second Home?
      London’s Second Home (pictured) is opening a Lisbon outpost in May. Photography: Iwan Baan
      Lisbon living
      One obvious factor is Lisbon’s low cost of living. Various figures put rent at nearly 75 percent cheaper than London, and you’d need a take-home monthly salary of more than $7,000 to enjoy the same quality of life in New York as you could for under €2,500 in Lisbon (less than $3,600), according to Numbeo’s latest data.
      And it’s not just rent that’s cheap. It’s unusual to pay much more than €1 for a coffee or beer, while grocery prices are nearly 25 percent less than in another major startup hub, Berlin.
      Perversely, Portugal’s tough economic climate (particularly between 2010 and 2014) stood the capital in good stead for a tech boom. Its shrinking job market helped spawn a new generation of local entrepreneurs that, ultimately, kickstarted the city’s resurgence and imbued it with new sense of self.
      Another key part of Lisbon’s allure is the work-life balance enjoyed by residents. It’s no secret that Portugal enjoys great weather year-round, and the many nearby beaches are easily accessible by public transport. Maria Almeida, the ‘Almighty Duchess of Content’ at Lisbon non-profit Beta-i – the investment group behind top startup accelerator programmes, like the Lisbon Challenge and Beta-start – explains what a typical day might look like in the Portuguese capital for an entrepreneur or startup employee.
      ‘It’s not uncommon to leave the office at 7pm and go surfing or go for a drink with your friends in a bar with a stunning view over the city,’ she says.
      The Village Underground Lisboa co-working hub combines shipping containers and buses. Photography: VUL
      Co-working culture
      Lisbon’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is now beginning to mature. As Second Home co-founder Rohan Silva said to TechCrunch recently: ‘Lisbon feels like east London just before the tech cluster exploded… It’s a super-creative city.’
      When Silva’s Lisbon space opens inside Mercado da Ribeira in May, it will join a number of co-working spaces in the city including Coworklisboa and Village Underground Lisboa. The latter – linked to Shoreditch’s iconic Village Underground – is a particularly striking space, comprising shipping containers and disused buses. Architecturally, it’s designed to encourage interaction between co-workers.
      Inside one of Village Underground Lisboa’s upcycled buses. Photography: VUL
      Almeida points to some of the city’s most important success stories as further evidence of its maturation: ‘Startups such as Uniplaces, Farfetch, Talkdesk, Unbabel or Feedzai are good examples of that dynamism.’
      She continues: ‘The Municipality of Lisbon also pays close attention to this startup community and there are many incentives for entrepreneurs to start their companies here.’
      Giving entrepreneurs a boost
      Such incentives include a reduced tax rate for startup businesses, which can be as low as 7.5 percent, while investments of up to €5m can enjoy tax deductions of 20 percent. Corporate filing processes, too, have been simplified from a relatively lengthy ordeal to being executed at the push of a button.
      Lisbon has an expansive transit network made up of trams, trains and buses. Photography: Ann Wuyts
      Lisbon’s tech-friendly infrastructure
      Lisbon also benefits from the presence of two major universities and one specialist polytechnic institute, which help furnish its burgeoning businesses with up to 100,000 graduates a year versed in all things design, development, and programming. Skilled graduates equate to cheap labour in the eyes of entrepreneurs, so this is another reason why new money and opportunities are flooding into the Portuguese capital.
      Good transport links – the airport is just 15 minutes by taxi from the centre of town – and fast Wi-Fi speeds add to its appeal.
      These are some of the reasons Dublin startup event Web Summit, which drew crowds of 30,000 in 2015, chose to relocate to Lisbon’s spaceship-like MEO Arena and FIL Feira Internacional de Lisboa.
      The MEO Arena, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merril for the Universal Expo in 1998. Photography: Dynamosquito
      Designed by Portuguese architect Regino Cruz for EXPO ’98, the MEO Arena and its sibling in Parque das Nações have also hosted events like the MTV Europe Movie Awards. For Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave, they are ideal spaces to start the next chapter in Web Summit’s history, with the 2016 conference capable of housing up to 80,000 attendees.
      ‘We chose Lisbon because of the strong infrastructure in the city, the world-class venue and the thriving startup community,’ Cosgrave told The Irish Times. ‘Investors from across Europe have started looking to Lisbon to capitalise on the low rents and affordable IT talent.’
      World class architecture
      Beautiful venues aren’t in short supply in Lisbon. In many cases, they just haven’t been discovered yet, even by the locals. Almeida admits she didn’t know about the 16th-century Palácio de Pombal when looking for a home for the 2015 Lisbon Investment Summit. ‘You always find interesting new places, regardless of the time you’ve been living here,’ she says. Located in the heart of the Barrio Alto district, Palácio de Pombal is one of the few conference venues where you can attend a keynote speech and then relocate to a local craft beer bar within five minutes.
      Of course, Lisbon’s magnetism for startups, investors, entrepreneurs and the wider creative community can’t be pinned to a single factor, it’s the overall package that counts. The city’s intriguing architecture – where historic buildings stand beside striking contemporary additions on ramshackled streets – lends itself to constant discovery, while the low cost of living is an important part of its allure.
      Now Lisbon’s burgeoning tech scene looks set to boom. That’s something we should all raise a cerveja to. More

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      Second Home to open a Lisbon outpost

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      Co-working brand Second Home will make its first foray abroad this May when it opens an outpost in Lisbon.
      News of the expansion – announced by founder Rohan Silva at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Munich – comes as the Portuguese capital gets set to host its first Web Summit, an annual tech event in the autumn that draws more than 50,000 people.
      ‘Right now Lisbon feels like east London just before the tech cluster exploded,’ Silva told TechCrunch.

      ‘It’s a super-creative city, but there are not enough places for creative people to come together. At the same time, big companies are shrinking, more people are becoming entrepreneurs and the built environment of cities needs to evolve to keep pace with this.’
      Lisbon’s Second Home will feature a meandering 100m-long table that spans the width of the space as well as private meeting rooms, event halls and a late-night bar.
      The co-working company, which has just raised £7.5 million in funding, is also planning to open a Los Angeles base next year. More