Hello all,
I am currently renting in Coimbra since November, and looking for my first live-in deal in Portugal. I was in Caldas da Rainha for about 5 months prior to that, and I think that the Silver Coast (between Lisbon and Porto) offers relatively low price for good quality options. As in America, the mid-sized town (like Aveiro, Coimbra, Leiria ~70-120k people), and smaller towns (like Caldas da Rainha at 30k people) are getting more interest and offering better value and ROI, *IF* you can find the right niche. This may be for tourism like Nazare, Peniche, Figueira da Foz, or Fatima, or for retiree expats like Caldas da Rainha. There are many towns like this.
I am originally British, but also American, did 26 years in Colorado. Between my CPA girlfriend and I, we have 11 properties there, some are set up as rent-by-the-room. Since the Denver metro area has similar affordability issues as Portugal, and there are plenty of ugly houses here, I was hoping to do fix & split (buy ugly, live-in renovation, start renting by the room, then move on to the next one). There are a lot of migrants coming to Portugal, and were hoping to specifically target these splits to them as short to medium term rentals.
We have a couple of fellow investors in Colorado that are struggling to find deals, and hoping to bring some of that cash over into a partnership here. This is very attractive to several of them since they have SDIRA and Solo-401k funds.
From what I have seen so far there are limited loan options here. As @Diogo Candido said, max 85% LTV, though this can be hard to achieve because the bank valuation will be below sale price in hot markets, so realistically you would be down to 75-80% LTV. Americans that are recently migrated were having problems finding lenders to go over 50% LTV, though this restriction lifts after about 6-12 months, and does not apply to migrant Europeans.
@Ryan Morris if you are referring to http://idealista.pt , it's a bit of a crap shoot. I found a lot of no-reply / slow-reply, and scams when we were looking for rentals, and when we contacted sale listings for more info. Portugal has no MLS, so agencies list their own pool, and are very protective of it. I found it easier to contact several local agents when moving to Coimba, the competition seems to help them focus!
-- Mark
