Portugal plans to expand golden visa program
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Portugal is planning to expand its "Golden Visa" program.
The scheme, which offers a visa to a non-EU buyer who invests more than €500,000 in real estate - or whose investment creates more than 10 jobs - has been instrumental in the property market's recovery. Indeed, demand for Portuguese property has reached record highs in the past 12 months on TheMoveChannel.com, while one in five properties sold in Portugal in 2014 went to an overseas investor, according to the Portuguese Real Estate Agents Association.
Agreed sales increased for the 12th month in a row in December 2014, while new buyer enquiries continued to rise, according to the latest survey from RICS/Ci, extending the run of uninterrupted growth in demand to almost a year and a half.
Indeed, sales expectations are now the most buoyant in four years, with the sustained recovery in activity helping to stabilise house prices, which have now remained approximately unchanged for the past eight months.
As a result of the upbeat signs, confidence is also at a record high, with the RICS/Ci national confidence index (a composite indicator of price and sales expectations) rising to 27, a new peak for the report.
The Golden Visa scheme has been at the heart of that growth, with Deputy Prime Minister Paulo Portas saying that €1.27 billion has been invested in the country's real estae as a result.
The figures are in spite of a corruption scandal surrounding the scheme. Indeed, 11 arrests were made in November 2014 of various figures in the Portuguese administration, including the national heads of customs and registry offices. Minister Miguel Macedo resigned as a result.
"The property market grew by between 9 and 15 percent in 2014," the head of the Agents Association, Luis Lima, told the press recently. "If it hadn't been for the Banco Espirito Santo debacle and the golden visas scandal it would have been 25 per cent."
Mr. Portas announced to the press this Monday that the scheme would be more heavily supervised and scrunitinised in the future.
"The central objectives of the reform the government will propose to parliament are essentially two: guaranteeing greater inspection both of the decision making process and the decision to award gold visas and both internal and external supervision," he said.
Far from closing down the program or scaling it back, though, the country plans to push it forward and expand to include other assets, as well as real estate.
"We shall be opening up the range of opportunities for gold visa investors taking into account an economy that is already growing and an investment concept that includes property but also extends beyond this sector to open up the scope for financing other investments in other important sectors of our development," added Portas.
The new plans will see visas awarded to €350,000 investments made in scientific research and development carried out by public or private institutions in Portuga, or to investors injecting the same amount of monye into "lesser developed inland regions or in cultural or artistic performances", reports The Portugal News.