Remote off-plan buyers judge a developer by how well they are kept updated, and Ziggu’s Portugal review study shows negative reviews rising as the 2019 to 2022 boom reaches handover.
A buyer in Portugal, Spain or Italy signs off-plan, wires a six-figure deposit, and won’t see the finished unit for two years. Many do this from another country entirely: video calls, a Power of Attorney, no site visit before handover.
From the moment that deposit clears, their only real signal about the project is how well they’re kept updated.
This is the condition behind a lot of Southern Europe’s current boom. Portugal closed its golden-visa real estate route in 2023, and buyers kept coming. Italy’s flat-tax regime for new residents draws buyers who often commit before they have seen the finished home. On Spain’s southern coast, a large share of new-build buyers live abroad. In Greece, a purchase can be completed from abroad through a lawyer with power of attorney, so the buyer’s only window into their own investment is whatever the developer sends them.
Same condition in every one of these markets: the buyer is remote, the money is already committed, and how well they’re kept posted is what decides whether they trust the process.
This isn’t new to us. It’s the reason Ziggu exists in the first place.
Here’s the pattern, and it isn’t really about construction quality.
A market booms: more off-plan units sold, faster, to buyers further away. Two or three years later, that wave of units gets handed over. That’s when the first defects surface, and it’s also when buyers find out how their questions get answered once the deposit is in. If the answer is slow, or not at all, they don’t call. They post.
We looked at 271 public Google reviews across 45 residential developers in Portugal. Negative reviews sat around 13.5% before 2022. By 2023: 22.8%. By 2024: 48.1%, more than double the year before.
Reviews rated three stars or fewer, by the year the review was written; 2026 runs to 18 August. Source: Ziggu, Google Review Study: Portuguese Property Developers 2026, n = 271.
The timing fits a delivery wave: off-plan units sold in 2019 to 2022 would be reaching handover now.
The complaint data backs that up. Of the reviews naming a construction defect, 18 of 22 also named a service failure around it: an unanswered email, a warranty claim left untouched for months. The defect was usually the trigger. The silence afterward was the complaint.
We ran a similar exercise ourselves, in Belgium, back in 2017, before Ziggu was even a product. That homebuyer survey came back with an NPS of −42 for property developers. The follow-up, buyers surveyed through a Ziggu portal between 2019 and 2026, came back at +9. Different years, different samples; we’re upfront that it isn’t a clean before-and-after. But the shape is the same one we’re describing here: a good sale, followed by a silence nobody had built for.
If you’re building in Spain, Italy or Greece right now, this is worth noting: you’re mid-boom, which means your own delivery wave, and review wave, is still ahead of you, not behind you.
Good sales and good after-sales are the same job. The second half just runs longer, and quieter, if nobody’s built for it.
