About this investigation

Habitação em Números (Housing in Numbers) is an investigation into the housing crisis in Portugal. It examines the building of new homes, prices and rents, foreign demand, immigration, construction costs and the decisions of seven governments between 2000 and 2026.

The investigation is based on public data: INE, Eurostat, Banco de Portugal, AIMA, Diário da República and IMF reports. Every published number states its source and its level of evidence. Questions still open are kept in a public verification log.

Jorge Alexandre Pereira was born in Angola in 1973 and grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where he graduated in Tourism Management. He lived and worked in several countries, including a long period in Ukraine, before returning to Portugal. He lives in the Algarve.

He has worked in real estate since 2015. Since 2018 he has been with an international real estate company operating in the upper quartile of the market in the Algarve, where he led sales and marketing and is now COO. His experience in digital marketing and the web is the origin of this site.

He speaks Portuguese, French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian. Photography is one of his passions.

In this investigation he signs, in a personal capacity, the research, the text and the data work. His professional activity is described in the declaration of interests.

Contact: jorge@algarve.life · +351 960 166 482 · contact form

The project is funded solely by the author and does not accept advertising, sponsorship or paid content.

The investigation assesses governments of different parties with the same method. It separates what each government decided from what it inherited, what was announced from what was implemented, and the date of a decision from the date when its effects can be measured. In the charts, governments appear in neutral grey, never in party colours.

• Primary sources first. I use news reports as secondary sources, only when they give access to original data or studies.
• Five levels of evidence: official data, own calculation, third-party estimate, author’s analysis and awaiting verification. Anything awaiting verification is never shown as a headline figure.
• Explicit denominators. I do not publish any percentage without saying what total it is a share of.
• Counterfactuals and illustrative calculations labelled as such. I do not present them as measurements.
• Counter-arguments in view. I show them in every chapter, next to the conclusions.

Errors are corrected in the open. Each correction goes into the change log, with the date, the previous text, the new text and the reason, and earlier versions remain accessible. To report an error, write to jorge@algarve.life, giving the page, the statement and, if possible, the source.