I get called in two ways. Before a job, to tell someone whether a builder is worth hiring. And after a job, to work out what went wrong and who’s responsible — usually once the company that did it has gone quiet, or gone altogether. After enough of the second kind, you start seeing the same handful of moves again and again. Almost none of them are illegal. That’s exactly the problem. Here is what 25 years and a lot of picked-up pieces have taught me to look for.
Start with the thing most foreign buyers don’t know: in Portuguese residential construction there is no mandatory certification for individual tradesmen. Anyone with a van and a printed logo can call themselves a builder. A company may hold a construction licence — an alvará from IMPIC — but the person actually standing on your roof may hold nothing at all. The logo on the side of the van is not a qualification. It’s a sticker.
This is a newer one, and I’ve watched it bite my own clients. You find a slick, professional builder website — clean photos, the right words, looks like a proper outfit. Behind it is an engineer with no building alvará who uses the brand to draw clients in, subcontracts the actual building out to whoever’s available, and takes no responsibility for what happens on site. When the work fails, the engineer points at the subcontractor, the subcontractor has long moved on, and you’re the one holding it. So ask three questions and notice if they’re the same answer: who holds the alvará, who will actually be on site, and whose name goes on the contract? Those can be three different people, and the gap between them is where your money disappears.
You do your homework. You line up three or four “different” companies to quote, and you feel like you’re comparing the market. Sometimes you genuinely are. But I’ve seen clusters of polished builder websites — different names, different logos, sometimes different cities — that route back to the same operator behind the scenes. You think you’ve got three competing quotes; you’ve got one operator quoting himself three times and letting you pick the price he was always going to charge. Before you trust a brand, find out who is actually behind it — the company, the people, the history — not just the homepage.
Awards, seals, five-star “satisfaction” scores. In this trade they are marketing instruments, and far easier to obtain than the public assumes. I have personally watched heavily decorated companies — ones with a wall of logos on their website — leave jobs abandoned halfway through a renovation. A row of awards tells you a company is good at collecting awards. It tells you nothing about what they’ll leave behind in your house. Ignore the badges and ask for the only proof that counts: real finished addresses, and the owners who paid for them, on the phone.
Two things quietly corrupt the online picture here, and both work in the bad operator’s favour. First, Portugal has criminal defamation laws — injúria and difamação. An unhappy customer who publicly names and shames a bad builder can find themselves on the wrong end of a legal complaint, so a great many people simply stay quiet. The result is that the worst operators look cleaner online than they are, because the people they burned are afraid to say so. Second, a glowing “resolution rate” on a complaints platform very often just means complaints time out and auto-close after a while — not that anyone was ever actually helped. So when you do look, read the content of the complaints, not the score on the top of the page. The pattern in the words is the truth; the rating is theatre.
Let me be fair first: deposits in Portugal are legitimately large. Materials are expensive and the contractor carries those costs up front, so a sizeable deposit on its own is not a red flag. The trap is handing over a big sum — often in cash — to the first available outfit, with nothing in writing. Most renovation firms here are small limited companies (Lda). When one fails mid-job, litigating the dispute routinely takes years, and by the end the company has frequently been dissolved with nothing left to recover. So vet the company before any money moves, pay the deposit by bank transfer against a proper invoice and a signed contract, tie the remaining payments to completed and inspected stages of work, and never — ever — let the builder arrange your finance for you.
Here’s the good news: Portugal actually gives you the public tools to check, and almost nobody uses them. Before you sign anything, spend ten minutes on five things. Check the company’s IMPIC alvará — is it licensed, and for this kind of work? Look it up on the corporate register — how old is it really, how much capital does it have, who owns it? Confirm the registered activity matches building work and isn’t something unrelated. Read its complaint history — the complaints themselves, not the star rating. And ask the one question that cuts through all of it: who holds the alvará, who will be on site, and who signs the contract? If those three answers don’t line up, you’ve found your risk before it found you. There’s a fuller version of this in how to choose a renovation company in Portugal.
I’m not telling you the trade is rotten. There are excellent Portuguese builders and craftsmen, and I work alongside them every week — people whose work I’d put in my own home. What I’m telling you is that the muddy regulation and the soft public record let the other kind hide in plain sight, behind clean websites and bought badges. The only real defence is knowing what you’re actually looking at — or having someone independent on your side of the table who does. That’s half of what we do, before a job and after one. If you’re about to hire, or you’re already in trouble, talk to us before the next payment leaves your account — see how we run and oversee construction.
If you’ve found a property, or you’re fighting damp that keeps coming back, talk to us before you commit to anything. WhatsApp is the fastest way to reach us — we respond the same day, in plain English.
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