Portugal GV: Americans Among Top 5 Nationalities for 9 of the Last 10 Months

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Portugal’s golden visa program raised EUR 48.4 million from 98 investors and 123 of their family members in April. That represents a 22% increase on the month and a 72% improvement on April 2020.

In the first third of 2021, the program has seen capital investment amounting to EUR 173 million, injected by 326 separate investors. Annualized extrapolation of the program’s performance so far in the year would imply total investment by the end of 2021 amounting to EUR 519 million, significantly behind the EUR 647m raised last year. The same is true for application approvals, which are on a trajectory to number fewer than 1,000 this year, the lowest such figure since 2015.

Two-thirds of the year remain, however, and Portugal has shown, on many occasions in the past, that performance fluctuates considerable throughout the year. There is much to indicate that the subsequent months will see an improvement in approval volumes: Q1 in Portugal was marked by the country’s first large wave of COVID-19, which has since subsided. The first third of the year, therefore, is unlikely to be indicative of a general trend and is more appropriately considered a short-term deviation.

Contributing 9 main applicants, Americans, once more, featured in the top five applicant nationalities in April, as they have in 9 out of the last 10 monthly reports. Chinese, who accounted for 35 out of 9 applications in April, remain the dominant investor group. Brazilian and Russian main applicants numbered twelve and five, respectively, while Indians accounted for six applications.

The fund investment route continued to grow in popularity; so far this year, 7.4% of investors have opted for this investment category, up from 4% in 2020 and 0.56% in 2019. The proportionality between those investors who chose refurbishment property versus the standard EUR 500,000 acquisition remained stable; both in 2020 and so far this year, about a quarter chose to buy renovation property and a third picked conventional residential properties priced at half a million euros or more.

To learn more about Portugal’s fund investment route, and whether it has a future now that minimum investment requirements for this category will rise to EUR 500,000 from January, we invite you to listen to episode 4 of the Mobility Standard, which discusses precisely that question.