For the first time since 2020, the year in which the covid-19 pandemic began and paralyzed a significant part of economic activity, the national housing market suffered a contraction in 2023, both in the number of sales and in the total amount transacted. Even so, house prices continued to increase, although the pace of increases maintains the slowdown already observed since the beginning of last year.
The data was published, this Friday, by the National Statistics Institute (INE), which indicates that, in the year 2023 as a whole, the housing price index registered an annual increase of 8.2%, a value that represents a reduction of 4.4 percentage points in relation to the variation that had been observed in 2022 (the year in which the biggest increase in house prices ever was recorded). This slowdown, details the INE, is due to both new and existing homes, whose prices increased, respectively, 8.7% and 6.6% compared to the previous year, variations that, in both cases, represent a slowdown.
The increase in prices that is still occurring is despite the significant falls already recorded in the real estate market. In total, 136,499 homes were sold in 2023, for a total amount of around 28 billion euros, values that correspond to drops of 18.7% and 11.9%, respectively, in relation to 2022. These numbers represent , also, an evident decline compared to the uninterrupted growth that had been observed for several years: since 2017, so few houses have been sold in Portugal, at the same time that the total amount transacted is the lowest since 2020.
