Luís Montenegro's Executive has decided to revoke the coercive lease of vacant houses, as well as to extend the extraordinary support for rents, it was announced this Monday, during the briefing that followed the extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers.

The Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, stressed that the measure of the Programa Mais Habitação, adopted by António Costa's Government, "punished private property" and "did nothing to help investment".

"The State must set an example and cannot want to punish private individuals", he said, in statements to journalists after the extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers. 

In this line, proposals for changing the rules for local accommodation (AL) included by the previous Executive were approved, such as the revocation of the extraordinary contribution, referring to the municipalities the regulation of the activity in their territories.

The objective will be to place trust in the local authorities to develop projects to be presented to Estamo, which manages the State's real estate assets. The entity "can only oppose if it does not [comply] with the public interest or if [it has] an eminent public project to launch", thus foreseeing the "semi-automatic injection" of these vacant properties.

"Public properties must indeed be injected into the market, made available to provide more homes for the Portuguese", he stressed.

There were also two changes to be announced at the fiscal level, namely the extension "of the possibilities of reinvesting capital gains when selling permanent own housing", which now has a period of 12 months, instead of 24, as well as a measure aimed at "encouraging labor mobility", which will allow those who change cities for work and rent a property more than 100 kilometers away, with the previous house being rented to third parties, to deduct the value of the new rent from the one received.

In addition, it was announced that those who lost support for rents due to a change in the contract may receive it again, provided they maintain the requirements, including having an effort rate with the payment of rent higher than 35%.

Conferência de imprensa do Conselho de Ministros Extraordinário https://t.co/uA3Y2Td6v7

— República Portuguesa (@govpt) May 27, 2024

It should be recalled that the measure of coercive lease of vacant houses was highly criticized, which the then Prime Minister considered to be "strange", since "there is already the forced lease provided for in the law, in the legal regime of identification and urbanization for a long time".

Costa stressed that "the figure of the vacant building has also existed in the legislation for a long time, since 2006, for tax purposes", having pointed out that the "municipalities have been classifying" these buildings since then and that, currently, there are "about 10 thousand, more than half of which are in the city of Lisbon".

"Forced lease is not expropriation", he reiterated, having at the same time considered it to be "a public entity renting a closed house at market value". 

[News updated at 6:37 pm]

Read Also: Entities reinforce the purchase of housing and represent 14.5% in 2023 (Portuguese version)