LISBON: Just weeks after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union, Peter Thompson, a British healthcare consultant, sold one of his two homes in the fishing town of Tavira in Portugal’s Algarve region, capitalizing on the plunge in the pound against the euro. Thompson and his wife, who spend half the year in the British northwest county of Cumbria and the other half in Portugal, had bought their second property in the Algarve at the end of 2015 from another Briton who sold his home at a discount after the U.K. announced it would hold a referendum on its EU membership. When Thompson, 59, and his wife sold their property, they were able to take advantage of a drop of more than 10 percent in the value of the pound against the euro. “We didn’t want to have two homes in Portugal,” Thompson said in a phone interview from Cumbria. “Our timing to sell was almost perfect because it allowed us to take advantage of a weaker pound.”
The pound’s post-Brexit-vote drop has triggered a flurry of real estate deals in Portugal as British second-home owners sell properties — sometimes at a discount — and still make a profit, according to investors and real estate brokers. Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in southern Portugal’s Algarve, a long-favored destination for British nationals, where demand from French property investors is now on the rise. “British property buyer numbers began to fall after the sterling fell following the Brexit vote,” said Zoe Hawker, head of Fine & Country Algarve, a real estate broker with about 900 listings. “The flip side was very good because the French are coming in with stronger euros and buying from agents like us who happen to have large portfolios from British sellers.”
