App publishes map of vacant houses, owners say it is illegal

However, the National Association of Property Owners considers the application illegal and is considering taking it to court.

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

For this collective – which includes designers and programmers – that created the application, Portugal has “an underused 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 indicates that there are “around 48 thousand empty houses in Lisbon alone”. The aim is to “make all these houses visible in the application” and contribute to resolving the housing crisis, since “cities are able to absorb the housing needs of the population”.

The Devolutos app, which aims to “push for the recovery of abandoned properties”, is accessible to anyone who “can photograph a vacant property and associate its geographic location”. The app is available free of charge for Android, iOS devices and in a web version.

What seems simple to the collective, for the National Association of Property Owners makes the application “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 “filing legal action against the perpetrators”, the owners’ representative warned: “this will not happen with voluntarism” and “it is not private individuals who have to resolve the housing problem”.

António Frias Marques highlighted that many of the vacant houses “are the result of long-term contracts, in which the tenants remained in the house for many years paying very low rents”, many of which need work to be done before they can be put back on the rental market.

To do this, “thousands and thousands of euros are needed”, since, he exemplified, “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 an approved project to be transformed into hotels” and that they are only vacant “until the works begin”.

The app 's founders and owners also disagree when it comes to inheritance processes.

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

For Vassalo, tax reform and incentives are necessary so that inheritance processes are not “an impediment” to the use of these properties, proposing that “houses that are in good condition can be rented out coercively”, with “the rent values ​​always reverting to the inheritance treasury”.

António Frias Marques recalled 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 value of the Municipal Property Tax (IMI) applied to other buildings.

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

Owners are advised 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 take action to have this website cancelled, because this does not solve any problem,” said António Frias Marques.