According to ECO calculations, in the first quarter of 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, a house in Portugal of 60 square meters acquired through a 30-year mortgage loan, indexed to the 12-month Euribor rate and with an entry of 20% of the capital, translated, on average, into an instalment equivalent to one-fifth of the household income. In the first quarter of 2023, that same house purchased on the same financial terms requires an effort rate of 38%.

In just three years, the effort rate of Portuguese families to buy a house increased, on average, 1.9 times in the 24 most populous municipalities in the country, which are home to more than 100,000 inhabitants. This is an extremely aggressive increase, especially if we consider that between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2022 there was only a slight change in the financial effort of families to become property owners.

And among those who have the most difficulty in changing homes in their municipalities are residents of the Lisbon metropolitan area, particularly in Seixal, Setúbal and Sintra, where the effort rate has more than doubled since the first quarter of 2020.