[voisin]

> The median house price in Lisbon and Porto metro areas, are now above what the p95 Portuguese salary can pay. So yes, speculation and wealthy foreigners are an issue, as it's not Portuguese salaries propping these values.

The second sentence doesn’t necessarily flow from the first. The same is true in major cities in Canada, New Zealand, England, etc etc, and this has little to do with foreign visitors and much to do with interest rates and availability and quantum of credit.

[lazide]

Uh, all of the locales you mention have been targets of huge foreign investment and ‘rich person’ immigration in the last decade.

[voisin]

Canada first massively disincentivized foreign investment and the. limited it altogether because, like Portugal, foreigners were the scapegoats for wildly increasing housing prices. Turned out they had almost nothing to do with it and it was all poor government monetary and lending policy. Governments will do everything they can to deflect blame.

I don’t have direct experience but I have a good friend from New Zealand who says the situation there closely mimicked what he has seen in Canada. Easy to blame foreign money, hard to look in the mirror.

Also, as a side note: “rich person” immigration is absolutely unequivocally not the reason for house prices skyrocketing in places like Moncton, New Brunswick or Campbell River, BC. No one from Monaco or Hong Kong is clamouring to buy houses at 5x historical average valuations compared to income.

I suspect in 5 years it will become obvious that in Portugal the situation had to do with monetary policy and not foreigners as well. Time will tell.

[tharmas]

Mostly false. Theyve been trying to attract foreign ”investors" for quite some time. Expo 86, 2010 Winter Olympics. What the clowns didnt realise was all the ”investment” would just go into housing. Nothing else

[voisin]

Every country tries to attract foreign investment. It’s a major component of GDP. And the difference between Canada ca. 1986 and 2010 versus 2018-2024 is… monetary policy! (Though admittedly 2010 looks pretty similar to 2018, house prices were already starting their insane run up).

It’s monetary policy. Housing prices are the fault of governments of various levels (constrained supply at the municipal levels, easy credit at the national levels). It isn’t foreigners, at least not in Canada, NZ, England, etc. and I’d bet money it isn’t in Portugal either.

[lazide]

Sure, but that isn’t the assertion I was replying to!

My personal opinion is the wealthy gravitating to a spot are as much about it being a useful ‘nutrient gradient’ on the monetary policy front, after the primary places are exhausted (like the big US cities) or because those places were less accessible now.

But the original assertion I was replying to was that those places never had the rich foreign investor thing happen - when they absolutely did!