After years of advocating the abolition of frozen rental contracts, the Lisbon Landlords Association (ALP) has just launched a public petition demanding that the Government and parties with seats in parliament “immediately end” the freeze on old rents. As of 10:45 am this Tuesday, the petition had collected around 300 signatures, with at least 7,500 needed for the petition to be discussed in the plenary session of the Assembly of the Republic, according to a report by ECO.

In a statement, the association believes that the “secular conditioning of the national rental market (…) prolongs the agony of all landlords who, forced by the State, have maintained rental contracts for over 40 years”, as well as “generations of tenants who are forced into debt, due to the reduction in the supply of houses for rent in large cities at fair prices”.

In addition to the immediate abolition of the rent freeze, the ALP calls for an “urgent” and “sensible” extraordinary update of the frozen rents starting next year, a request supported, in the petition, with a proposal to adopt a new calculation formula for calculating these rents “currently with very low values”.

The Lisbon landlords justify the request with the fact that the current mechanism for calculating frozen rents, in force since 2012, “results in values ​​that are up to ten times less than the metrics practiced in the affordable rental programs that are promoted and supported by the State”. This mechanism “harms owners who have effectively been putting up with frozen leases at very low values ​​for decades”, which is explained “by the fact that the properties of these owners necessarily have a negligible taxable property value, due to the coefficient of the age of the properties applied”, argues the ALP in the statement.