House price inflation (and along with it rents) has been stoked quite purposefully with measure after measure to increase demand and reduce supply, from Golden Visa in exchange for €500k in “realestate investment” and massive tax incentives for european retirees and digital nomads to move to Portugal (at some point Sweden had to intervene as its own citizens were fleing paying any and all tax via that scheme), to a refusal to seriously limit AirBnB (which in Lisbon took 10% of places out of the housing market and turned them into tourist accomodation) and pretty much no more public housing construction (Portugal has one of the lowest rates of public housing in Europe)
Even when price to income ratios balooned to many times the historical average governments activelly continued to act to increase prices.
Unsurprisingly, most members of parliament in Portugal from the 2 main parties have “realestate investments”.
Meanwhile yearly emigration out of Portugal is massive and now more than 50% of those leaving are young adults with university degrees (aka braindrain), the average age at which people leave their parent’s house is in the mid 30s and birthrates are well below replacement rates (if I remember it correctly the country has the 4th most aged population in the World) because the cost of living is too high for the salaries paid and most of that is housing costs which afects mostly those who don’t own their own place bought at 20-years-ago-prices, i.e. the just graduated and young adults right when they’re having children.
It’s a complete total fuckup which has already stored a decade or two of problems (thanks to braindrain and people being unable to afford having kids) all to make more money for a few politicians and politically connected assholes.
Add the forecasts for Portugal with Global Warming (it will basically become a desert anywhere but on the coast) and I think the country will be steadily collapsing in economic and quality of life terms for the coming decades.
All of this has been pretty visible for at least a decade, but portuguese management culture is complete total crap (as I can tell you from personal experience, here and by comparisson with Northern Europe) and politcians are the most incompetent of an incompetent bunch, so there is zero strategy, zero analysis and everything is an “unforseen problem” when things predictably blow up.