In the 1st quarter of 2024, rents for new residential lease contracts in Lisbon showed a variation of 0.4% compared to the previous quarter, according to the Residential Rent Index calculated by Confidencial Imobiliário. This stabilization comes after two quarters of falling rents and keeps the market in the level of containment it has seen since the middle of last year.
It is worth remembering that rents in Lisbon began to recover from the losses recorded during the pandemic in the second half of 2021, observing, from then on, increases that reached 10% and were almost always above 4.0%. However, given these levels of growth, which led to rents increasing by 30% in the space of a year, naturally, the new contracts tended to slow down the increases. Thus, in the 3rd quarter of last year, rents for new leases fell for the first time in two years, with a quarterly variation of -0.5%, and the 4th quarter not only confirmed the downward trend but made it more vigorous, with contracts signed in this period recording rents 2.2% lower than the previous quarter.
The stabilization now recorded (+0.4%) consolidates this cooling trend, which is especially visible in the year-on-year rate of change. In the 1st quarter of 2024, rents from new contracts increased by 3.1% compared to the same period in 2023. This rate compares with the 8.7% recorded just one quarter earlier and the 28.9% recorded a year ago. one year.
Harbor
In Porto, rents from new contracts also registered a quarterly variation of 0.4% in the 1st quarter of 2024, consolidating the cycle of loss of intensity observed over the last year. Since the beginning of 2023, rents charged in new contracts in Porto have been rising at a slower pace with each new quarter, with increases ranging from 3.0% to 4.0% in the first three quarters, to 0.9% in the 4th quarter of the year, with a further deceleration to 0.4% in the 1st quarter of 2024, resulting in a compression of almost 18 percentage points in the year-on-year rate of change. Specifically, if in the 1st quarter of 2023 rents accumulated an annual increase of 27.1%, in the 1st quarter of this year, this indicator fell to just 9.5%.
In the 1st quarter of 2024, the average contracted rent in Lisbon was €18.8/m2 and in Porto it was €14.5/m2, according to data from SIR-Arrendamento.
