Foreigners Bought 1,392 Homes in Lisbon's ARU in 2025 — The Lowest Print Since 2017 as the Vistos Gold and RNH Wind-Downs Bite, Yet the Average Ticket Climbed 10% to €632,000

The investment retreat in Lisbon's expat-facing residential market has now stretched into a fourth consecutive year, and the 2025 print breaks below the 2017 floor. Data prepared by Confidencial Imobiliário for Dinheiro Vivo show that foreign individual buyers acquired 1,392 homes in Lisbon's Área de Reabilitação Urbana (ARU) last year — the boundary that excludes Parque das Nações, Laranjeiras and Alta de Lisboa. That is 12% fewer than the 1,575 transacted in 2024, and the lowest annual count the consultancy has registered since 2017, when the figure was 973.

Capital deployed by these private foreign buyers still topped €879 million, a 3% drop on 2024. Lisbon attracted purchasers from 64 nationalities. The headline that pulls in the opposite direction from the volume number is the ticket: the average price paid by foreigners climbed roughly 10% to €632,000, almost a doubling against the 2016 average of €315,000 — the year Portugal effectively entered the international real-estate radar.

What Is Pulling Volume Down

Ricardo Guimarães, who runs Confidencial Imobiliário, attributes the volume contraction to two specific policy unwinds and one rate cycle. The wind-down of the vistos gold regime, which had channelled an unusually large flow of Chinese capital into the Lisbon residential stack at the peak, is the first lever. The closure of the Residentes Não Habituais tax window, which had pulled in French buyers in particular, is the second. The 2022 ECB rate hiking cycle is the third, and it weighed on every cross-border purchase decision regardless of nationality.

What has not contracted is supply at the relevant price points. Guimarães told Dinheiro Vivo that the segment oriented toward international demand is the only segment of the Lisbon residential market that is not capacity-constrained: “If there is one segment that has supply, it is the one oriented to international demand.” That is why the average ticket can keep rising even as transaction count falls. Price discovery in the foreign-buyer slice is being set by a thinner market of higher-budget purchasers who are paying for valorisation and rising construction costs, not paying through scarcity.

Who Is Replacing the Outflow

The nationality mix shifted in 2025. Americans remained the single largest foreign buyer cohort and lifted their share from 13% to 16%, with 222 acquisitions. They were followed by Brazilians (157), French (153), British (94), Chinese (85) and Germans (68). Guimarães flagged a new entrant pattern worth watching: Eastern European instability is sending Polish capital into Lisbon, and he expects Gulf capital to add weight if the regional war drags on. The historical chinês-then-francês pattern is being replaced by a more dispersed flow.

By freguesia, the cluster around the central spine retained its capital-attraction position. Estrela took €149 million in foreign capital, up 37% on 2024. Santo António took €133.5 million, up 20%. Misericórdia took €104.8 million, up 4.6%.

The Wider ARU Picture

The ARU as a whole transacted €2.9 billion in private investment in 2025, down 5% on 2024. Portuguese individual buyers still drove 70% of that capital — €2 billion, against €879 million from foreign individuals. The Portuguese cohort actually added volume — 4,543 homes purchased, up 5% — while cutting the average ticket by 11% to €444,000 (still 30% below the foreign-buyer average). Corporate investors retreated harder: 1,480 homes, down 15%, with €898 million committed, down 12%.

For the expat reader doing a 2026 Lisbon valuation: the supply story is intact, the price-per-square-metre story still drifts up, and the buyer-pool story is broader and less concentrated than it has been at any point since 2017.