In Lisbon, rents increased by 5.6 percent year-on-year in the second quarter, after remaining virtually unchanged quarterly (0.2 percent). It is necessary to go back to the third quarter of 2014 to find a lower variation (2.6 percent), thus confirming the cycle of successive braking of the climbs over the last year. Following the 21.9 percent rise in Q2 2017 (which was the peak of the recovery cycle that started in late 2013, after the 19 percent drop in the crisis period), Lisbon still remained around 20 percent until early 2018, but started to slow from that point onwards, from a year-on-year change of 17 percent in the second quarter of 2018 to the one now recorded.

In Porto, the year-on-year change in the second quarter of 2019 was 9.7 percent, the lowest in the last two years. Also quarterly, the 1.7 percent increase shows a cooling. In this market, the maximum variation was reached in the 3rd quarter of 2018, with a year-on-year increase of 23.1 percent, culminating in the path of intensification of the rises since mid-2017. At the end of 2018, income growth already fell to 18.9 percent, rising to 13.5 percent in the following quarter and now reaching below 10 percent.

In Portugal, house rents increased 10.8 percent year-on-year in the period under review, maintaining the average growth rate observed in the last two years (of 11 percent). The quarterly change was 2.7 percent, also in line with the 2.8 percent average increase since the 2nd quarter of 2017.

“These results suggest a similar behaviour to selling prices, whose most recent increases in the country's aggregate now seem to be driven by peripheral markets rather than by Lisbon and Porto. Available data do not indicate that there was an increase in supply which in turn was pushing down rents, and this stabilization cycle was the culmination of a very strong growth process so far and which of course could not continue indefinitely, ”comments Ricardo Guimarães, director of Confidencial Imobiliário.