Before signing the reservation agreement, you will need to obtain a Portuguese tax number (NIF), which serves as your identification for payments to the state. This can be done at any tax office in Portugal – they are located in every major city and the service is completely free of charge. At the tax office, we also requested a temporary password to access our account at https://www.portaldasfinancas.gov.pt. As a foreigner, you log in by entering your NIF number and temporary password, which you should change after your first login.

Next, you need to open a checking account at a Portuguese bank. Monthly fees for maintaining the account are usually around €6. We took care of these matters right away during our stay after viewing the property.

We strongly recommend that you verify the current information about the property in the land registry before signing the reservation agreement. This can be done easily online for a fee of €1 at https://www.predialonline.mj.pt. You will receive the so-called Informação Predial Simplificada (simplified property information). To do this, you will need to know the freguesia (parcel) and registro predial (property registration number).

As part of the reservation agreement itself, it is necessary to pay a non-refundable deposit – in our case, it was 20% of the property price. If you ultimately decide not to purchase the property, this amount would be forfeited. Conversely, if the owner withdraws from the agreement, they would have to pay you double the deposit, i.e., 40% of the purchase price. We were surprised that there was no variable symbol for the amount we were supposed to send, but this is standard practice here.

After the real estate agent sent us a draft reservation agreement along with the official documents about the house, we read it and suggested several changes. The first concerned the number of days in advance that the owner must notify us of the date of signing the final agreement. Although we eventually agreed without any problems, it is better to have this clearly stated in the contract. Since the purchase also included the furnishings of the house, we wanted this to be better specified in the contract. We also recommend including in the contract that you will inspect the property before signing the final contract.

After incorporating our comments, all that remained was to sign the amended contract on all sides and send it electronically. We found it a little strange that the authenticity of the signatures was not verified in any way. Then all that remained was to send the aforementioned deposit.