Petition calls for “immediate end” to rent freeze

After years of campaigning for the abolition of frozen rental contracts, the Lisbon Landlords Association (ALP) has now launched a public petition demanding that the government and the parties sitting in parliament “immediately lift” the freeze on old rents. As of 10:45 am this Tuesday, the petition had collected around 300 signatures, with at least 7,500 needed for the petition to be debated in the plenary session of the Assembly of the Republic, according to a report by ECO.

In a statement, the association believes that the “secular conditioning of the national rental market (…) prolongs the agony of all landlords who, forced by the state, have maintained rental contracts for over 40 years”, as well as “generations of tenants driven into debt due to the reduction in the supply of rental housing in large cities at fair prices”.

In addition to the immediate lifting of the rent cap, the ALP is calling for an “urgent” and “meaningful” extraordinary update of the frozen rents from next year. This demand is supported in the petition with the proposal to introduce a new calculation formula for calculating these rents, “which currently have a very low value”.

The Lisbon landlords justify the request by saying that the mechanism for calculating frozen rents, in force since 2012, “results in values ​​up to ten times lower than those practiced in the affordable rent programs promoted and supported by the State”. This mechanism “harms owners who have been resigned to frozen leases at very low values ​​for decades”, which is “explained by the fact that the properties of these owners necessarily have a negligible taxable property value due to the age coefficient applied to the properties”, argues the ALP in the statement.