With the Portuguese luxury segment including any property for sale and costing over €500,000, Soares said his company had sold 212 such properties with the average price up nine percent to a round €870,000.
Soares also said that 2014 had seen Sotheby’s Portuguese real estate operation see international clients rise to 66 percent of total turnover whereas a year earlier they were back on 50 percent with the General Director also pointing out that such sales were not gold visa related as the company did not deal with such processes.
The year 2014 had seen French citizens make up the largest proportion of these international luxury property purchasers with 29 percent of the total ahead of Brazilians and British citizens on 17 percent and 14 percent respectively.
In terms of the value of the property acquired, the Angolans led the Chinese and the British with sales averaging out across these nationalities of €1.8 million, €1.5 million and €1.2 million respectively.
Soares also told journalists that “it is an urban myth when they say luxury stands up to everything” before detailing how the sector in Portugal had shrunk by 60 percent in turnover between 2007 and 2012, fractionally ahead of the global luxury market’s slide of “around 57 percent”.
The General Director affirmed that the last two years had seen the desire for luxury return with a better market environment fostered by good terms of credit.
Indeed, off the back of such favourable conditions, Soares set the objective of doubling in scale Portugal Sotheby’s International Realty over the year and boosting everything from its number of offices to its employees with the latter set to rise to 180 from the 100 in employment at the end of 2014.