Lisbon Tenants’ Association says government housing measures will keep market ‘wild’

The Lisbon Tenants’ Association (AIL) believes the new housing strategy unveiled by the government will “deteriorate” the market and maintain “savagery” and fears the aim of old contracts is to make them “unsafe”.

Reacting to the measures included in the New Housing Strategy unveiled by the government on Friday, AIL Secretary General António Machado believes that the program’s promise is to “continue the eviction legislation approved in 2012” and that “Small Changes. introduced into the city’s rental regime over the past eight years “will be cancelled.”

It is about eliminating aspects that “were very simple and did little good” but which “always improved the law on evictions a little,” says António Machado.

“Not regulating the market, not monitoring the market, which we propose, will not solve anything. Everything will only get worse, and the savagery will continue. And this is unacceptable,” said the head of AIL in a statement to Luse.

The government, he said, says it wants to “fix” these issues to give the market “confidence and flexibility”, but the AIL general secretary understands that this will not happen because the market is already flexible enough.

“It is enough to see the unreliability of contracts. It is enough to see the huge cost of rent to understand that this is over-liberalization and that there is no trust between the parties,” he said.

The new housing strategy includes the appointment of a task force to correct “distortions introduced into the city’s rental regime over the last eight years”, a measure which AIL is particularly concerned about and which it intends to “validate”, fearing the aim is to overturn the provision Mais Habitação of the previous government, which blocked the transition of so-called old leases to the New Urban Rental Regime (NRAU).

“The issue of old contracts is not clear enough, but it can be understood in this wording that there is every intention to transfer existing contracts to the NRAU. […] in other words, making them unsustainable in the long term, affecting the majority of the older and more vulnerable population with lower incomes,” he said, stressing that this is an unacceptable measure of “extreme aggressiveness.”

As for reducing the VAT rate to 6% for housing construction and rehabilitation work, he is skeptical about the result, since there is no guarantee that this tax reduction will effectively affect the final price of houses.

“Nobody guarantees. Most likely, this VAT reduction will be absorbed by the real estate process, increasing agents’ profits,” he said.