Residency-by-investment is not a permanent feature of any political landscape. That has always been the correct way to think about it, and 2026 is making the point with unusual clarity. Portugal closed, Spain reformed, Greece adjusted its thresholds, the UK stopped. Other programmes have opened or expanded in their place. The map is not the same as it was three years ago, and buyers who planned their structure around programmes that no longer exist in the same form are managing the consequences.
The practical lesson is one that experienced advisers have been making for years, with limited success: treat residency as a structural bonus to a sound underlying asset decision, not as the primary thesis. The asset must stand on its own — location, quality, liquidity, management — before the visa consideration enters the analysis.
What is moving and why
The pattern in the current wave of reforms is fairly consistent: programmes that attracted high volume at low price points drew domestic political attention, particularly in markets where housing affordability is contested. Governments responded by raising thresholds, restricting qualifying property types, or closing the programme to new applicants in high-demand areas. Portugal’s restriction of the programme to interior regions was the cleanest expression of this logic; Greece’s threshold increase followed a similar political dynamic.
What has not changed is the underlying appetite among mobile, globally positioned buyers for a second or third residency as a component of a sensible life structure. That appetite is being met by a different set of programmes — Gulf-based options have expanded significantly, several Caribbean programmes remain active and competitively priced, and a handful of European jurisdictions outside the most contested markets continue to operate accessible routes. The golden visas & residency-by-investment guide sets out the current landscape and the due-diligence questions worth asking of any programme.
The asset question comes first
The more interesting observation is about what happens when you strip the visa out of the decision. In many of the markets where programmes operated, the underlying property case was strong independently: well-located prime stock in Lisbon, Athens, or Dubai would have attracted buyer interest without any residency benefit. The visa accelerated the decision and widened the buyer pool, but it was not manufacturing demand from nothing.
For buyers who are now approaching these markets for the first time — without the visa as a driver — the analysis is cleaner. The golden visa entry in our glossary walks through the mechanics of how qualifying investments typically work. What it underlines is the importance of understanding exactly what residency is being conferred, what obligations attach to it, and what happens to it if the programme is subsequently reformed. These are questions about the legal durability of a structure, not merely about the purchase price, and they require specialist legal advice alongside the property search.
The current moment, with several programmes in transition, is a reasonable one in which to approach the category with more care and less urgency than the marketing around it has sometimes encouraged.
