I had seen the listing for the house in Olhão which we toured and talked about in Oh, Olhão!?!. Michelle wanted to cancel the tour because we hadn’t been thinking about buying a house and didn’t want to waste the real estate agent’s time. I persisted and immediately after the tour it felt like our perspective shifted.

We concluded that once school ended in May, there would be nothing tying us to the Algarve. We had a lot on our minds. Is it a good time to buy a house? Are we ready to start over in a new place? Will we regret leaving Olhão and our friends? Can we find a new Café Bianca? How many things don’t we know about Portuguese property ownership? Does it make sense to keep renting indefinitely? Where the heck would we move to?

Our answer to these questions and many more was “it doesn’t hurt to look”. The most obvious next step was an online search. One of the biggest challenges was that we hadn’t traveled to major portions of the country and aren’t super gifted in the geography department. There were tons of city and region names that we had never heard of. Thank goodness for Google Maps, it is very important in our lives.

The next biggest hurdle was solidifying what we wanted from a relocation. The initial process of moving to Portugal was technical and detailed, but our perspective on moving was casual: we wanted a different life and were willing to ride the flow of whatever came our way. We trusted that we had the capabilities to deal with most hurdles, and tried not to overthink it. If we were purchasing a property and making a mid to long term commitment, we wanted to take a more analytical approach. This was especially true because we initially planned to wait until we were Portuguese citizens before making a house purchase, what would have been 5-6 years in Portugal, was now closer to 2 years. We had to give thorough consideration to potential pluses and minuses.

One of the more popular real estate (and rental) listing sites used in Portugal is Idealista. Most of the rental properties our first real estate agent sent us were from this website, so we were already familiar with it. The site has lots of filters which makes it easy to do specific searches. Since the house we toured in Olhão would be about a €350,000 investment we started with what that amount would buy throughout the country. Immediately we saw that, although €300,000 was a great price for the South, it wasn’t necessary to spend that much in locations outside of the Algarve, Lisbon, or Porto. We lowered the price point in €20,000 increments and found that €160,000 – €200,000 seemed to be the amount we would spend if we really were going to buy a house.

Initially we spent a ton of time looking at almost every house in the country in our price range (there were thousands). We discussed and planned for hours in our quest to find a place that would fit our family today and in the future. As we thought about our needs and wants in home ownership we determined that we aren’t terribly worried about the weather, other than avoiding Minnesota or Alaska climates at this point. After 2 years of school we are now confident enough in our language skills and wouldn’t exclude non English speaking regions of the country. Going forward weather and language were not major factors in our decision.

The House: We didn’t want to buy land without a house on it and we didn’t want a ruin. Ruins are very common in Portugal, essentially a crumbled stone framework of an ancient house. While the idea of renovating a ruin is romantic, it definitely is not for us. We wanted 2 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, and a living space comparable to what we had in Medford (1600 sq ft). Our preference is a house versus an apartment or condominium since Michelle plays piano and Basil can be a bit barky in his old age. Plus, our years of graveyard shifts mean we often stay up very late watching movies or playing games. We built up a list of about fifty houses from all different regions of the county and each morning we would sit together and pour through all the new listings and review the properties still on our favorites list.

Examples from our original list:

• Quintas (farms) with vineyards and large pieces of land. These often included a second plot of land in the same region and commercial buildings with wine making or farming equipment. How many outbuildings do we need?
• Condominiums/apartments are the most popular type of housing in Portugal and we did have a few on our list because they are common in mid-sized towns and can be quite spacious. We didn’t want to overlook an amazing value by automatically ruling out an entire category even though we prefer a house.
• A house that looked like it would be in the movie Scarface, the style felt completely out of place in Portugal. It stayed on our favorite list for weeks before we ruled it out.
• A multi story inn that included a cafe on the ground floor and a disco in the basement. Completely unreasonable but within our budget and we did spend a few hours contemplating what we could do with such a unique space. Rent out the cafe? Host murder mystery nights? Hold massive board game parties? Run a bar/disco? Become DJ’s? Did we want to run an inn or B&B?
• Some massive houses with land that consistently looked like they had been cobbled together, building codes be damned! Sometimes the layout of the house and its relationship to the property was impossible to envision, even with schematics included in the listing.
• A famous deceased poet’s house an hour outside of Lisbon that was an actual historic site.

Medical Care Options: Although right now we are both generally healthy we want to be near a reliable medical network to meet any future needs. We haven’t discussed this before but it is a concern in the Algarve. Many people have to go to Lisbon for any significant medical procedure or to see specialists. The same is true for most of the interior Eastern part of Portugal so, although there were unbelievable options in that part of the country we decided they weren’t right for us.

Public Transportation: Opposed to my expectations, not having a car has been a liberating experience. Although a car purchase will likely happen in the next year or two, we wanted to avoid having to buy both a house and a car right away. We prefer not needing one for our normal routine and want to be able to walk to a grocery store, cafe, dentist, restaurant, park, or city office. Socially and culturally we would also like to be able to walk to a movie theater, concert space, library, mall, etc. Optimally we would be near a city big enough to have all those places and a large enough population that we will be able to find friends with similar interests who could then walk to our house for a visit if they felt like it.

Easily walking to bus and train service also felt important, even if I have a car I don’t necessarily want to drive it into Porto or Lisbon where driving is a bit of a nightmare. These criteria helped us cut out lots of more remote places, specifically in the area east of Nazaré. This area is notable in that there are many huge houses at bargain basement prices. If you are just looking at a map you might think “perfectly situated between Lisbon and Porto” when the reality is “placed in a position that makes everything a bit inconvenient other than a life of solitude and quick access to watching big wave surfing”. We also nixed most everything in the Douro valley for similar reasons.

Access To A Big City: If we were going to live close to one of the two largest cities in the country our hearts pulled us towards Porto versus Lisbon. We wanted to be within an hour of one of those two cities. This would open up another level of cultural opportunities which would all be possible in a single day trip.

Searching for a Portuguese house was one of the most considered decisions we’ve ever made in our lives, if not the most thorough. Typing out some of our criteria now makes it seem like a quick series of decisions when in fact it was a slow see-saw of back and forth discussions. Houses that could have been ruled out based on previously listed parameters lingered on our lists because we gave them bonus points for one reason or another (a game room half the size of a basketball court, a swimming pool, a great description but almost no pictures, a really good yard for the dogs to play in).

As we forced ourselves to eliminate the not quite right properties we kept coming back to one house on our list that seemed to fit all of our criteria, a veritable Cinderella’s slipper. The downside was that we were once again considering a move to a city we knew very little about, including how to pronounce its name.