Porto is the municipality with the most dynamic real estate investment in housing in the so-called Atlantic Axis, which also includes Vila Nova de Gaia and Matosinhos.
According to Confidencial Imobiliário, in the first 10 months of this year, around 4,400 new homes were submitted for licensing in the city, the highest pipeline in the country, continuing the strong activity seen in the last two years, when 5,980 homes were submitted for licensing.
Porto also stands out in the conversion of projected investment into actual supply, which reaches 75%, considering the licensing and pipeline data for 2023 and 2024, significantly above the 56% in Vila Nova de Gaia and 36% in Matosinhos, as well as the national average of 50%.
In addition, for the first time since the 1990s, these three municipalities in the Atlantic Axis recorded simultaneous population growth. Porto leads this reversal of demographic decline: after reducing its population from 301,000 inhabitants in 1991 to 233,000 in 2014, between 2016 and 2024 it recovered around 20,000 inhabitants, with annual growth of around 3%. This recovery is equivalent to the combined growth of Vila Nova de Gaia and Matosinhos, which attracted around 12,000 and 8,000 new inhabitants, respectively, during this period.
Ricardo Guimarães, director of Confidencial Imobiliário, states in a press release that "Porto is the city that attracts the most projects and where these are most likely to come to fruition, reflecting a greater ability to compete for resources in the construction sector, which is unable to respond to all orders and is obviously attracted by higher value markets".
The expert recalls that "between 2015 and 2024, Porto licensed 50.9 dwellings per thousand inhabitants, well above the national average of 21.9, Matosinhos (29.4) and Gaia (40.3). However, even so, it only averages 49.4 in the eurozone, a fact that says a lot about the current cycle we are experiencing and shows that Porto alone, without Gaia and Matosinhos, will not meet housing needs."
In October, Porto had an average house sale price of €3,600 per square metre (12-month cumulative), followed by Matosinhos with €3,155 and Vila Nova de Gaia with €2,488. The three markets show strong appreciation, with year-on-year price increases in the third quarter of 2025 of 18.4% in Porto, 194% in Matosinhos and 17.3% in Vila Nova de Gaia.