However, the reality remains practically the same: there is a lack of houses, prices remain too high for many families and countless projects are still waiting for years to move forward.

Perhaps the problem lies in the way we continue to look at housing. We almost always treat it as a legislative issue, whereas today it is mainly a question of the ability to implement. After more than two decades linked to the real estate sector, I learned a simple thing: no law, no matter how good it is, built a single house. The houses are built by investors, developers, architects, engineers, banks, construction companies, workers and public entities capable of deciding in a timely manner, such as Oeiras.

Legislation can help or hinder. It can create stability or uncertainty. It can encourage investment or make it unviable. But it never replaces the ability to transform a project into a completed work. And it is precisely there that Portugal continues to fail. The country does not only suffer from a lack of capital. It continues to attract national and international investors, institutional funds, companies and developers interested in the market. The problem lies in the difficulty of predicting how long it will take a project to obtain all the necessary authorisations.

For any investor, predictability is just as important as taxation. Companies can adapt to demanding rules. What they can hardly accept is the permanent uncertainty. Each month lost on a license increases financial costs, aggravates the impact of inflation on construction and can turn a viable project into an economically impossible one.

This does not mean reducing environmental, urban or technical requirements. Portugal needs rigour, transparency and quality in planning. But rigour should not mean indefinite slowness. An efficient system must be able to analyse, supervise, and decide within clear timeframes.

Perhaps it is time to evaluate housing policies in a different way. Instead of counting how many measures have been announced, we should be measuring how many houses have actually made it onto the market. Instead of constantly discussing new laws, we should ask how long a project takes from the first idea to the delivery of the keys.

The Portuguese real estate market has changed profoundly. It has become more professional, more international and more demanding. But the administrative machine is often still prepared for an economy from another time. Municipalities with few technical resources, entities with overlapping competences and poorly coordinated processes make it difficult to respond to the housing challenge.

Portugal does not need more diagnoses or more commissioned studies. We already know that there is a lack of houses, that licensing is slow and that unpredictability drives away investment. What is missing is to execute better.

Because housing is not born when a new measure is announced.

It is born when the country manages to transform good intentions into houses where people can actually live.