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The ageing and degradation of built heritage is an important topic in discussion around the world, especially when located in urban areas, and it raises concerns about their safeguard and preservation. In this regard, national and regional policies have an important role in controlling the level of the interventions and giving the stakeholders tools that allow taking sustained decisions. For that, it is fundamental that the decision-making entities have the information concerning built heritage characteristics and in-situ conditions, and incorporate this data in their policies, namely through inventorying and cataloguing processes. Such information is also fundamental to establish differentiated levels of intervention and support the consideration of flexible and proportional criteria in building codes and regulations. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of an integrated assessment of inhabited built heritage to feed plans, guidelines and policies concerned with the control of interventions, particularly on buildings with values that should be preserved, in order to support accurate decision-making. To do this, a specific assessment tool built within the Methodology for the Assessment of Residential Built Heritage (MARBH) is applied to a specific set of old residential buildings located in the historical centre of Porto, Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]