A mortgage brokerage that reads foreign tax returns
Elevate Finance was built for one kind of client: the international buyer whose income does not arrive on a Portuguese payslip.
The gap we kept running into
Our sister firm, Elevate Accounting, is a practice serving English-speaking expats and international entrepreneurs doing business in Portugal. Clients kept arriving with the same story: they had found a property, they had the money, and the mortgage had stalled.
Not because the numbers did not work. Because a Portuguese underwriter had been handed a US tax return, a set of UK company accounts or a pension statement in a fourth currency, with no explanation attached, and had done the only sensible thing with an unfamiliar document — read it conservatively.
We were already fixing those files for accounting clients. Elevate Finance is that work, done properly, as its own business.
An accounting practice sits behind the brokerage
That matters more than it sounds. Most mortgage brokers can tell you what a bank wants. Fewer can look at three years of company accounts and tell you which line an underwriter will discount and why, or explain how a purchase structure will look on your tax return in two years’ time.
Elevate Accounting works from Lagos in the Algarve and Carnaxide in the Lisbon metro area. When a mortgage question turns into a tax question — which it often does, usually around whether to buy personally or through a company — the answer does not require finding a second adviser.
Four things we do differently
We do the work before the application
Most of the value is in what happens before a lender sees your file. Getting the income narrative right, catching a property problem early, choosing which lenders to approach. Submitting is the easy part.
We tell you when the answer is no
If the numbers do not work, or the property has a problem, or the timing is wrong, we say so. A declined application sits on your record and makes the next one harder.
We do not drip-feed document requests
You get one consolidated list at the start. Repeatedly going back to a client for one more document is a sign the file was never properly scoped.
We read the Portuguese
The offer conditions, the valuation report, the promissory contract, the deed. You should know what you are signing before you sign it, not after.
What we will not tell you
There are claims that are easy to make in this industry and hard to stand behind. We would rather be specific than impressive.
- We will not claim to be independent or to survey the whole market. We work with a defined panel of lenders and we will tell you who is on it.
- We will not publish rates. What you are offered depends on your file, and a headline number on a website is a marketing device rather than information.
- We will not promise approval. Nobody can, and the ones who imply it are selling something.
- We will not describe what we do as advice. There is a specific meaning attached to that word in Portuguese financial regulation, and we intend to use it accurately.
How we get paid, in plain terms
When a bank funds a mortgage we introduced, that bank pays us a commission. That is our entire income from your file.
You are never invoiced. There is no arrangement fee from us, nothing is taken out of your loan, and there is no charge if the application does not go ahead. Because our fee sits on the lender’s side of the transaction, using a broker does not make your mortgage more expensive than walking into that same bank on your own.
This is simply how mortgage intermediation works in Portugal: the lender pays the intermediary, and the service is free of charge to you.
Start with a conversation
Tell us about the property and how you are paid. We will tell you what is realistic, and whether we are the right people for it.