Your offer has been accepted, and everyone is smiling. Then the agent asks for a reservation payment, a few thousand euros to take the property off the market while the contract is prepared. It is the least understood payment in a Portuguese purchase, and the easiest one to get right.
A step the law does not give you
Portugal's Civil Code knows the promissory contract, and it knows the deposit, the sinal, that goes with it. It does not know the reservation. The reserva you will be offered is a creature of market practice, not of statute: a short agreement, usually with the selling agency, under which the property comes off the market for a fixed period while your lawyer prepares and checks the CPCV.
That has two consequences worth understanding before you pay anything. The first is that there is no standard reservation: no official form, and no amount fixed in law. Everything about it, the sum, the days, the refund, is whatever the paper in front of you says. The second is that it binds far less than people assume. A reservation does not oblige the seller to sell to you at the agreed price in the way a CPCV does, and it does not oblige you to buy. It buys time and exclusivity, nothing more. Treat it as exactly that and it is a useful tool. Mistake it for a contract, and it becomes an expensive misunderstanding.
What it usually looks like
On a resale around Cascais and Lisbon, the pattern is fairly consistent. A reservation payment of €5,000 to €10,000, held against a period of about two to four weeks, commonly 14 to 30 days, during which the property is withdrawn from the market and the CPCV is drafted and negotiated. New-build launches play by looser rules: developers often ask for more, and tie the reservation to a unit and a price list rather than to a negotiated deal.
Before anyone signs anything, you need one unglamorous thing in place: your NIF, the Portuguese tax number. Contracts, bank accounts and the payment itself all run through it, and a reservation signed in a rush without one is a small mess someone has to unpick. It takes days to obtain through a fiscal representative, which is one more reason to start it the week you start looking, not the week you find the house.
Who holds the money is the whole question
Where the money sits during those weeks matters more than the amount. If it sits with the mediation agency, the law gives you a real protection. Article 18 of the real estate mediation law, Lei n.º 15/2013, treats any sum the agency receives from a prospective buyer before the contract as money held in deposit: the agency may not use it for its own benefit, and it must hand it back immediately when asked. Read that again. Agency-held reservation money is, by law, returnable on demand.
Money paid straight to a seller or a developer is different. No deposit rule protects it, so the only protection is the document you signed. That is why the same reservation can be nearly risk free in one deal and genuinely exposed in another, and why I like my clients' reservation money held by the agency, or by their own lawyer, wherever the deal allows it.
Five things in writing, before you transfer
Who receives and holds the money. A named person or company, and an IBAN that matches the name. If the account name and the agreement name do not match, stop.
What the payment buys. The property off the market, for a stated number of days, with a stated end date, and an honest answer on whether the agency may still queue backup reservations behind yours. Some do, openly. Know which kind yours is.
When the money comes back. The refund triggers, written plainly. If your lawyer's checks find a serious problem, if your financing is refused, if the seller withdraws, if the CPCV wording cannot be agreed: in each case the money returns, within a stated number of days.
Whether legal review is a condition. The cleanest reservations say plainly that the buyer's lawyer reviews the title documents during the window, and that an adverse finding ends the deal with a full refund. Get that sentence in, not implied.
Where the money goes next. If the purchase proceeds, the reservation amount should be credited against the CPCV deposit, the sinal. If it is not going to be credited, ask why before you pay, not after.
Use the window like it matters
The reservation weeks are the cheapest working time in the whole purchase. Your lawyer pulls the certidão permanente, the land registry extract, checks the licences and the paperwork and reads the condominium position, while your mortgage, if you have one, moves from conversation to pre-approval. Problems found now cost an email. The same problems found after the CPCV cost the deposit.
This is also where the contrast with the CPCV deserves one clear paragraph, because the two payments are confused constantly. At the CPCV, your money becomes sinal under articles 441 and 442 of the Civil Code: if you then walk away without legal ground, the seller keeps it; if the seller walks away, they return it double. The reservation has no such machinery. It is small, short and, when it is drafted properly, refundable. The CPCV is none of those things, which is precisely why the diligence belongs in the reservation window, before the serious money moves.
Then it hands over
A reservation that has done its job ends in one of two clean ways. Either the checks fail and the money comes back, or the CPCV is signed on schedule, the reservation sum folds into the deposit, and the purchase steps onto the rails described in the promissory contract article. What it should never do is drift: a reservation extended again and again, with the property in limbo and the terms getting vaguer, is a negotiation tactic, not a stage of your purchase.
This is step seven of the buying sequence, the full route from first question to final sale, in order.
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