Lisbon, Oct. 29, 2024 (Lusa) - The state-owned Estamo estimates that the Portuguese state owns 60,000 properties and said that it has inventoried 2,000 properties since May.

At a ceremony in Lisbon, the president of Estamo said that there are 200,000 properties registered in the land registry as belonging to the state, but that most of these are registrations made when the owner is unknown and only for tax purposes (and that there is no usurpation of property for the state), so it is estimated that 60,000 properties actually belong to the state.

‘We estimate that we have 60,000 properties that are owned by the Portuguese state,’ said António Furtado at the signing ceremony for the SIGPIP - Sistema de Informação e Gestão do Património Imobiliário Público (Public Real Estate Information and Management System) financing contract (financed by the Recovery and Resilience Plan), which the Secretary of State attended for the Treasury and Finance, João Silva Lopes.

According to the manager, it has already been possible to load 2,000 properties into the system (inventoried, registered and geolocated) since May and Estamo expects that ‘by the end of 2026 all the state's real estate assets will be loaded into the new tool’.

The creation of a digital database of public property assets was introduced last year in the State Budget for 2024.

In 2021, in the Audit Report on the state's property assets inventory, the Court of Auditors warned that there was still no complete and up-to-date inventory of the state's property assets.

The Court of Auditors stated at the time that the universe of properties to be inventoried remained unknown and that there were still difficulties in the legal and registration regularisation process, giving examples such as properties that had already been sold but not written off.

IM/ADB // ADB.

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