Called “Devolutos”, the app allows you to identify vacant homes and buildings “and add them to a map”, aiming to “build the most accurate portrait possible of the national shame of having urban centers which are dilapidated and without people living there while there is a call for more construction”, Nelson Vassalo, a member of the activist group, told Lusa news agency.

For this group – which includes designers and programmers – that created the app, Portugal has “an underutilized or abandoned housing stock”, a situation that the new resource aims to denounce, initially in Lisbon and, later, in the rest of the country.

According to Nelson Vassalo, the census points to “around 48 thousand empty houses in Lisbon alone”. The goal is to “make all these houses visible in the app” and contribute to solving the housing crisis, since “cities are able to absorb the housing needs of the population”.

The Devolutos app, which aims to “put pressure on the recovery of abandoned properties”, is accessible to anyone who “can photograph a vacant property and associate it with its geographic location”. The app is available free of charge for Android and iOS devices and in a web version, on the website www.devolutos.com .

“Illegal”

What seems simple to the group, for the National Association of Property Owners, the application is “illegal”, since “no one can photograph (…), advertise or publicize” private properties “without the owner’s consent”, its president, António Frias Marques, told Lusa.

Admitting to “taking legal action against the perpetrators”, the representative of the property owners warned: “this will not happen with voluntarism” and “it is not the individuals who have to solve the housing problem”.

António Frias Marques highlighted that many of the vacant houses “are under long-term contracts, in which the tenants stayed in the house for many years paying very low rents”, many of which need renovations to be put back on the rental market.

To do this, “thousands and thousands of euros are needed”, since, for example, “for a house with 100 square meters, in Lisbon, the average price to renovate is 40 thousand euros”.

The president of the association also warned that the app may contain “photographs of medium and large buildings, already with approved projects to be transformed into hotels” and that they are only vacant “until construction begins”.

Inheritance

The founders of the app and the owners also disagree on the inheritance processes.

“We need legislation that speeds up and unfreezes the processes”, argued Nelson Vassalo, claiming that it is not possible to have “properties that are idle for 10, 20, 30 years while inheritances are being discussed”.

For Vassalo, tax reform and incentives are necessary so that inheritance processes do not become “an impediment” to the use of these properties, proposing that “houses that are in good condition can be rented out by force”, and “the rental values ​​always go to the inheritance treasury”.

António Frias Marques pointed out that “legislation already exists” and that houses “can be rented while the inheritance process is ongoing”, but he disagreed that this rental could be done coercively, which would be “another attack on the owners of vacant houses who pay 10 times more” than the Municipal Property Tax (IMI) applied to other buildings.

The promoters of the application estimate that it could be extended in the coming months to the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto and, later, to the Algarve and the rest of the country.

The owners are warned that they can do so “with regard to public buildings”, but not with regard to private ones.

“If the situation worsens, the legal department of the National Association of Property Owners will file a lawsuit to have this ‘site’ closed, because this does not solve any problem”, said Antônio Frias Marques.