Lisbon, Faro and Braga are the three districts leading a surge in house prices across the nation.
The pace of house price increases has not been seen since the distant days of 2001.
Data released this week by Confidencial Imobiliário, an information management company for the property sector, shows that September’s year-on-year increase was 7.5%.
The districts of Lisbon, Braga and the Algarve showed the biggest rises at 14%, 11.1% and 6.9%, respectively.
Oporto, despite booming city-centre prices, only shows a 2.9% increase due to a sluggish performance in outlying areas in the district."You have to go back to 2001 to find rises of this magnitude with the 7.5% year-on-year growth observed in September being more than triple the year-on-year rate of 2.1% 2015," commented CI director, Ricardo Guimarães, noting growth over five consecutive quarters.
The analysis shows that the current price behavior is the culmination of an upward three year trend starting in mid-2013, when prices bottomed out. Overall, prices have risen 11.1% since then.
This study reinforces the doom-laden warning issued last month by the International Monetary Fund for the need to be vigilant with property prices rising to pre-crisis levels.
The IMF study looked at 57 countries and ranked them on the price inflation. In 18 countries, property prices fell due to the crisis and stayed low. In another 18 countries, prices dropped and now are rising steadily. In the remaining 21 countries, prices fell a bit and soon bounced back.
Portugal is in the second category. According to the IMF, Portugal was the 15th country where prices had risen the most.
