The Cascais Letter · Buyer notes

Due diligence in Portugal: the checks that happen before your deposit does.

The CPCV is the moment a Portuguese house purchase stops being a conversation and becomes money. You sign a binding promise, you hand over a deposit, and from that day, walking away has a price. Everything your lawyer can do for you is cheaper and easier before that signature than after it, which is why the real work of buying here is a stack of unglamorous documents, read against each other, in the weeks before you sign. Since 2024 the State no longer checks them for you at the deed. This is the stack: what each document proves, and what none of them can.

Filed under: Buying in Portugal

Why everything happens before the signature

The CPCV, the contrato de promessa de compra e venda, is a real contract, not a reservation formality. The deposit paid under it, the sinal, has teeth. Under the Civil Code, a buyer who defaults for a reason that is their own fault loses the deposit to the seller. A seller who defaults owes the buyer double what was paid, and the buyer can instead ask a court to complete the sale in the seller's place, the remedy called execução específica. There is no cooling-off period in which a deposit quietly comes back.

That is the whole logic of due diligence. A problem found before the CPCV is a negotiation. The same problem found after it is an argument about whose fault it is, with your money sitting in the middle. So a well-drawn CPCV is written around the checks: completion is made conditional on what the paperwork still has to prove, on the seller's charges being discharged at the deed, on the licence position being what you were told, on your mortgage being approved where you need one. If a check then fails, leaving is an exit the contract already allows, not a default that costs you the deposit.

One more change matters here. Until 2024, the deed itself forced two key documents into the open: the use licence and the housing technical sheet had to be produced when ownership transferred. The 2024 Simplex law removed that requirement. A deed can now go ahead on a property whose licence nobody has produced, with the notary recording a warning instead. Nobody upstream is checking. Your lawyer is the check, before the CPCV.

The work runs in a rough order:

  1. Pull the registry and the tax record and read them against the listing and the viewing, while the price is still a conversation.
  2. Check the licence and the council file against what is actually built.
  3. Start the condominium paperwork early. The seller's administrator has up to ten days to issue the declaration the law requires, and that clock belongs in your timetable, not in the week of the deed.
  4. Draft the CPCV around what the checks still have to prove, with dates, conditions and exits.
  5. Pull a fresh registry extract before every point of no return: before each deposit top-up and again before the deed.

The land registry certificate: who owns it, and what is riding on it

The first document is the certidão permanente do registo predial, the land registry certificate, ordered online from the registry service for EUR 15. It does four jobs. It describes the property as the State has it recorded: its identification, composition and areas, and the tax article it corresponds to. It names the registered owner and how they acquired it, and registration carries a legal presumption that the right belongs to the person the register names, so this is the document that answers the most basic question in any purchase: is the person selling you this house the person who owns it.

It also lists every charge in force against the property: mortgages, court attachments (penhoras), usufructs, easements and other registered rights, and it shows registration requests still pending. The certificate stays valid for six months and is kept updated throughout, so a charge registered last week appears on the extract you pull today. Anyone can order one: you do not need the seller's permission to start.

What it cannot do is just as important. The registry records rights, not bricks. It cannot tell you whether the extension, the converted garage or the pool was ever approved by the council, and it cannot tell you where the boundary runs on the ground. A clean registry certificate is the beginning of the file, not the end of it.

The caderneta predial: the tax office's version of the same house

The second document is the caderneta predial, the property's tax record at the Autoridade Tributária. It carries the matriz, the tax article number, the recorded areas, the registered use and typology, the recorded holder, and the valor patrimonial tributário, the official tax value from which your IMT at purchase and your IMI each year are calculated. Only the owner can obtain it, free, through the tax portal, so your lawyer asks the seller for it rather than pulling it directly.

The caderneta does not prove ownership. It is a tax document, and treating it as a title deed is a beginner's error. Its real value in the file is as a second description of the same property, written by a different office for a different purpose. Now the checking becomes a matching exercise. The registry describes a house. The tax record describes a house. You walked through a house. All three descriptions should agree on the areas, the rooms and the use. When one of them shows a room, a floor or a few dozen square metres that the others do not, you have usually found work that was never recorded, and work that was never recorded is very often work that was never licensed either. That mismatch, small as it looks on paper, is one of the most common reasons a purchase slows down, re-prices or stops.

The use licence: what the council approved, and what got built afterwards

The licença de utilização, in current language the autorização de utilização, is the council's confirmation that a building was finished in line with its approved project and is fit for the use stated on it: housing, commerce, and so on. Two boundaries define it. The first is age. Buildings completed before the general building regulation of August 1951 never needed a use licence at all, and the exemption is evidenced by a council certificate or by a tax record showing the property was registered before that date. The second is scope. The licence covers what was approved, no more. The closed balcony, the annexe, the pool, the converted storeroom: none of them is inside the original licence, however long they have been standing.

Your lawyer therefore checks the licence against the council's file, the approved plans, and the property as it stands, sometimes with an architect or engineer walking it. The comparison answers a plain question: is the house you are buying the house the council approved? Where part of it is not, the work may be legalisable, at a cost in fees, time and sometimes alteration. It may be tolerated in practice but never regularised, which follows the property into every future sale and mortgage application. Or it may carry an enforcement risk no buyer should inherit unknowingly. In practice, banks still ask for the use licence before they will lend, whatever the deed now allows, so a missing licence can stop a mortgage even when it cannot stop the sale.

The technical sheet and the energy certificate: the two quiet documents

Homes built, extended or substantially rehabilitated after March 2004 also carry a ficha técnica da habitação, a technical sheet describing the dwelling's construction and systems as completed, which the developer had to deposit at the council. Like the licence, it no longer has to be presented at the deed, so nobody will hand it to you unless your lawyer asks. Ask. It is a useful cross-check on what was actually built, and its absence on a post-2004 home is itself information.

The energy certificate works the other way: this one the seller cannot skip. A valid certificate is required from the moment a property is advertised, the class, from A+ down to F, has to appear in the listing, and the certificate number is recorded at the deed. Certificates for homes are generally valid for ten years, the cost falls on the seller, and the register is run under ADENE, the energy agency. Your lawyer's check is narrow and quick: that the certificate exists, that it is in date, and that its number verifies in the system. What it will never tell you is whether anything built on the plot was legal. It grades the house's appetite for energy, not its paperwork.

The condominium declaration: the one debt that can follow you home

Buying a flat, or a house inside a condominium, adds a document with a trap in it. Since 2022 the Civil Code has required the seller to obtain a written declaration from the condominium administrator stating every charge currently applying to the unit, with amounts and deadlines, and every debt the seller owes the condominium, with the dates those debts arose and fell due. The administrator must issue it within ten days of being asked. The declaration is a mandatory document at the deed, with one exception: the buyer can state in the deed itself that they waive it.

Do not waive it casually, because the waiver is the trap. A buyer who waives accepts responsibility for any of the seller's condominium debts on that unit. Without a waiver, the law splits liability by timing: debts that fell due before the transfer are the seller's; charges falling due afterwards are yours. With a waiver, that protection is signed away in the deed, in a sentence most buyers never read. Your lawyer will also look past the declaration to the recent assembly minutes, the current budget, any works approved or planned and the special assessments that come with them, and the building's insurance. A building about to re-roof itself at every owner's expense is not a secret; it is in the minutes, for anyone who asks.

Which debts follow the property, and which stay with the seller

A buyer's fear, usually unspoken, is inheriting a stranger's debts. Portuguese law draws the line in a place that makes sense once you see it. Debts that are registered against the property follow the property: a mortgage, a court attachment, a registered lien. They are all on the registry certificate, which is why the certificate matters, and in practice they are dealt with at completion: the seller's mortgage is cancelled at the deed out of the price, and an attachment has to be lifted before a clean transfer can happen. Debts that live only with the seller, an unpaid credit card, a personal loan, do not transfer to you and do not attach to the house.

They still matter, for one reason: an ordinary debt can become a registered attachment if a creditor moves against the property. Between your first registry extract and the deed, weeks pass. That is why the last step of the discipline is a fresh extract pulled close to completion, and before any deposit top-up along the way. On tax, the rule is tidy: IMI, the annual property tax, is owed by whoever owns the property on 31 December of the year it relates to. Your lawyer confirms the property's IMI position is settled and sees proof of payment, so the account you inherit starts at zero.

Planning, and the countryside version of all this

Two checks sit above the individual property. The first is planning: what the municipal plan, the PDM, says this plot and this building are for, and what it would allow next. A house recorded as housing, on land classified for it, is a different purchase from a charming building whose use the plan never contemplated. The second applies beyond the towns: land crossed by the national ecological or agricultural reserves, REN and RAN, carries restrictions on what can be built, extended or changed, binding on whoever owns the land.

Rustic land, a quinta, a ruin with a view, deserves its own warning. There is no use licence for land itself. The registry description and the rural tax record disagree with each other, and with the ground, more often than a foreign buyer expects, and the boundary lines on paper, the confrontações, are the weakest part of the record. Neighbouring owners can also hold pre-emption rights on some rural sales. On land, a measured survey by a topographer is money well spent, before the CPCV, not after it.

Your lawyer is not the notary

Foreign buyers often assume the notary at the escritura does this work. The notary does something different, and the distinction is the whole point. The notary authenticates the deed, verifies the identity and capacity of the people signing, receives the documents the law still requires, collects the taxes due on the transfer, and, since the Simplex, records a warning where a property's urbanistic titles are missing rather than refusing to proceed. The notary serves the transaction. The notary does not investigate the property for you, does not compare the registry against the balcony, and does not draft your protections.

That is your lawyer's job, and it is why the lawyer has to be yours: independent, instructed by you, and paid by you, rather than borrowed from the seller's side of the table. Marcela is a buyer's agent, not a lawyer, and this article is a map of the work, not a substitute for it. The lawyer runs the checks in this article, reads the documents against each other and against the physical property, and writes what they find into the CPCV while the writing can still change the outcome.

When a check fails

Checks fail in ordinary ways. A registry extract shows an attachment nobody mentioned. The licence covers a two-bedroom house and you viewed three bedrooms. The condominium minutes reveal a special assessment worth a year of fees. None of these has to kill a purchase, and before the CPCV most of them do not: they become a price discussion, a deadline, or a condition that the seller puts the paper right before the deed, with your deposit protected while they do it.

What turns a failed check into a lost deposit is sequence. Sign first and discover the problem second, and you are a buyer refusing to complete, inside a contract that prices refusal at the deposit. Run the checks first, write their results into the contract's conditions, and the same problem is an exit you already own. Read in the right order, these documents are the difference between a deposit that buys you time to think and a deposit that buys you an argument.

Sources

This is general information about how the system works, not legal advice on your own purchase. Every property has its own paper trail, and the checks above only protect you if they are run on yours, by your own independent Portuguese lawyer, before you sign.
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