Increasing the supply of housing on the market: solve the licensing problem

Many Portuguese cities, such as Lisbon and Porto, have taken on a new life over the past decade thanks to urban renewal, becoming more attractive and desirable places to live, visit and invest.

This urban transformation has been made possible by the involvement of real estate players such as Splendimension, which acquires buildings, restores them and basically offers new homes on the market.

In the last ten years, the company run by Lebanese Saleh Osseiran claims to have invested between 80 and 100 million euros in the rehabilitation of real estate in Portugal.

But there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to accelerate urban redevelopment in our country. "What would allow''us to place properties on the market faster is to improve the licensing issue,' Pedro Alves, a member of Splendimension's board of administration, told idealist/news.

It all started in mid-2012 when Splendimension's main shareholder Saleh Osseiran, who is Lebanese but also holds a Portuguese passport from the 1980s, decided to invest in real estate in Portugal after a business trip to Lisbon.