Buying a House in Portugal: Road Trippin’, Box Tickin’, Signature Flickin’…?

Our life is basically one big Excel workbook, or Notion Teamspace nowadays. Everything we have planned or organised, roughly since we started living together, has been ‘managed’ officially in some shape or form using digital tools. Yes. We’re nerds. From weekly menus and grocery shopping to holiday plans and packing lists, and from our financials to our entire Van Build and moving countries; we like to know what we’re at so that we don’t miss a thing. Buying a house isn’t for the faint- and unorganised-hearted. Especially not when you’re not yet fluent in the language. Settle in, this is a bit of a long one.

Serra da Estrela? Let’s go to MoSCoW first…

Before I get to the nitty gritty of the road trip we took, I wanted to share a bit about our approach. A big part of making sure we don’t overlook some very important things in buying a house is making sure that we really think things through and have some tangible criteria to help us stay grounded.

That’s why we’ve always kept a MoSCoW overview of what we were looking for in our next home, learning from the things that didn’t quite work out in the current one. A MoSCoW is a business-ey method where you list your criteria for success based on four levels that give us the four capitalised consonants with the ‘o’s added for dramatic effect:

• Must: Things our new home just must have as the bare minimum. If the house didn’t have one of these items, it would be a straight ‘no’. For example, a 2-bed semi-detached house is out of the question.
• Should: One step down from must, coming into compromise territory. These are the things that would make our lives better and would make us pay more for a home within budget. Them not being there could be compensated by other good things or by the possibility of being to create this ourselves at a later time.
• Could: Things that would be a real bonus but not a necessity or deal breaker. Mostly upgraded versions of a must or should item.
• Won’t: Things on the other end of the Must spectrum, there are also some items that are deal-breakers in themselves by being there while we don’t want them there.

Box adding in Portugal

Over the years we added many new criteria for buying a house, growing with both our experiences and financial security. For example, after living in Darfield, we added two very important things to us. First, having enjoyed our neighbours dogs’ barking day in day out, we added ‘free standing’. Second, having our car damaged by the parents allergic to some walking when doing the school run and lots of noise from the playground, we added ‘Near a School’ to the Won’t list.

After our lessons learned on the road trips, and rejecting the house with the 12 hectares of land, we added our final four items to the list:

• Must: In our designated search area – West of the Serra Da Estrela
• Won’t: have land exceeding +/- 20,000m2
• Won’t: be a complete ruin to build (to be able to live in)
• Won’t: have a lot of trees/an entire forest on the land to maintain and be responsible for (wildfires are a thing unfortunately)

After our road trips and viewings, our MoSCoW list looked like this:

The Big Actual Viewings road trip

Armed with this ‘manifest’ we went through our Idealista short list with a very fine tooth comb. We ensured we had our alerts for our designated region set-up to receive alerts for newcomers on the market rather soon. Soon, we got to a short list of around 8 homes that each ticked a lot of boxes. None at first sight seemed to tick all of them, but as we have learned so far, especially within our budget, it would be near-impossible to get a 100% score. Buying a house is all about compromises, unless perhaps you have billions to your name.

After a week of meticulous planning along with our estate agent (give her all the medals, if you want her details, get in touch!) we set out on Saturday 29th of July to visit 5 houses in the area between Tábua and Viseu. Two of the viewings actually happened, the other three, unfortunately, had some weird-ass estate agent to manage them and cancelled them at the very last moment. Still, because of our great sleuthing skills, we were able to visit all of them on that day.

We set off at 7am in the morning and didn’t get back until 7 in the evening. The first viewing was at 10.00 for a home in the Gouveia District. We scheduled the second around 12.00 near Tábua, a near-1.5hr drive. It was a bit mad, but we managed. Including a lunch break to ‘reflect’ on the two official viewings before we continued with our unofficial ones. The lunch spot even had a swing. Can’t resist a swing, can you?

The low down

House 1: Gate to the Estrela

The photos of this house on Idealista were ‘meh’, and the description was a bit awkward. A house with a chicken coop. A big one. We thought. The house itself looked relatively new and of a typical build for the area and presumed age. It comes with 17,000m2 of land. Around 1/3 of it consisted of thinned out pine trees. Another rough 1/3 of the land is built on (the big house, a small chicken coop, and a large commercial/storage building with a 3-bed small old house at the end of that; the original house before they built the big house). The other 1/3 is fruit and olive trees and usable land for gardening.

It was right at the edge of the Serra da Estrela and had wonderful views of the mountains. Amenities close by, but still the feeling of being out in the country. The house was in a very good state, had a basically new roof, and really good sized rooms. It also came with a house-print attic. Imagine all the christmas trees you could store there…!

The additional house and huge storage were a big surprise when we got there. This wasn’t made clear in the advert at all. The ground and gardens were very well maintained and the figs tasted amazing…

House 2: Gate to the Serra da Açor (and Estrela)

The next house was the one that we thought was THE ONE. The house came on the market on the Thursday before we set off on our trip. It had the views, looked cosy and light, had a manageable plot of land with fruit trees, and was close to amenities. It even came with a small pool and a ‘pool bar’ for those wonderful warm lazy afternoons. We could imagine having a few keg lines with our own beer in there. There were some lovely little quirky places to sit around the house, and the barbecue was ready to go.

The house looked as picturesque in real life as it did in the pictures. The setting was simply stunning, and the glorious weather made it even better. The land was well-maintained, but rather compact. The pool area was as advertised and surely we’d not think it awful to spend some time there. The rooms, however, were very small, as was the living area. They had used some serious wide angle lenses there. There was also next to no storage space available. No garage or a space to actually brew the beer we’d like to drink while lounging in/next to the pool. There was scope to expand on this, obviously, and build something purpose-built there, brand new up to our own specs. What did our MoSCoW list make of all of those compromises though?

House 3: Electricity Tower Central

This house was a bit of a wild card. The pictures and description were not very clear, but what we could see had potential. Apart from the electrical wires that we did see in the pictures. It was very reasonably priced though, and had character. With some TLC surely we could make something really nice out of this if it would tick many of our MoSCoW boxes. What wasn’t clear was the amount of land that came with it though.

When we got to the location of the house, it was clear that this was another case of multiple hectares of land. At least 5, put potentially more. We did stroll up to the driveway until it said ‘private’, and being the decent humans that we are we didn’t have an illegal sneak peek. The house itself was quite secluded. We could see it from the point we had to turn around. The mountains in the background, and it was all rather quiet and serene. There were fruit trees and the land was already well-irrigated. But… it was a lot of land. We turned around and removed this one from our list when we got to the car. Great for the right people, probably, but not for us.

House 4: Retro Galore

House four had all the retro things going. It had the same type of shape and build as House 1, but was from quite a few years before that. The pictures showed decent-sized rooms, a wonderful outdoor space, more than enough storage space to brew our beers, and some outbuildings to be restored. As with the others, close to several basic amenities, and it had great views of the mountains. There were neighbours, but not in your face. The neighbours closest by did have a barking dog though… so that was a bit of a let-down, but dogs are everywhere and it was quite the distance to the house still.

We couldn’t watch inside, as this was one of the last-minute cancelled viewings, so we cannot elaborate on how it looked and felt inside. The windows were clearly in need of replacement though, and the outbuildings would need serious work to get them into something workable. But all in due time; Rome wasn’t built in a day. It really did have potential.

House 5: Rush hour

Remember how we said we did the whole sleuthing thing to check out homes before we even got there? To weed out homes before wasting our time? Well, this was one of the weird ones where even though we knew that it was probably not the right fit for us, we still wanted to have a look as the house, in the pictures, had a great feel. Light, bright, spacious, good views. But also next to something resembling a busy road, and there was an old industrial complex next to it. But perhaps we couldn’t see the industrial building from where we were, and the road, who knows, on Google Street view it looked rather quiet.

Well… we weren’t even near the house yet and we already knew that this wasn’t going to be our fit. A busy road, very built-up area, and it didn’t feel right at all. When we did get to the house, we really had to make ourselves stop the car and get out ‘for the sake of it’. It was loud, motorcycle and car galore, and there was a factory or quarry nearby that even on a Saturday produced enough sound to be heard through the entire valley. As soon as we got back in the car we removed that one too, and started our drive home.

What came next?

The drive home was a quiet one. Lots to think about, lots to sink in. We both had ideas, concerns, saw potential, and didn’t really want to imagine committing to something just yet. It did feel rather early, even though we had already developed our MoSCoW analysis to such a level of detail that with it we would be able to make a decision that we would surely be happy with.

Discussions with family and friends, and of course each other followed. We rewatched the videos and pictures that we had taken during the visit. The pros and cons, the compromises, the Ms and Ws held against the potential options of this trip. Was there one that would stick? Would we be buying a house anytime soon?

Well, we can say at this point that one did stick.

At the time of writing, Monday 28th August, almost exactly a month after the road trip, we flicked our signatures onto a ‘CPVC’, Contrato de Promessa de Compra e Venda, for one of the homes described above. There are some minor legalities to be sorted out and provided by the vendors, so it might take a while for the final contract to be signed, but, with a bit of luck, we have found our next home, and with it some right proper projects to take on!

Which one it is, you might already be able to guess, but because we don’t want to jinx things too much, we’ll leave the big reveal for the moment we have everything sorted and we can get really excited about all the plans we already cooked up and share that we are indeed buying a house in Portugal.