Greece underwent its own construction and real estate boom after the Athens Olympics in 2004, but it has finally come to a halt. Some 58 construction companies went bust last year, the highest number in a decade, and it has been estimated that there are 200,000 newly built apartments in Athens that remain unsold. Nevertheless, prices have so far fallen only modestly in Greece compared to other countries. Alpha Bank recently said that the prices of new properties had fallen by 3.8 per cent in the first nine months of 2009, and there was another small decrease in the last quarter of the year. Prices were dropping before 2009, and Cluttons recently estimated the overall fall as around 25 per cent since the peak three years ago.
Even as the crisis gets worse, though, bargains on the same scale as those to be found in Spain are unlikely to materialise in Greece, since there has not been any large scale development of tourist property. It is certainly a buyer’s market, as a number of agents have noted, and you may be able to negotiate a good deal, but Greeks have been ambivalent for years about marketing their property to foreigners, and they are unlikely to panic now.
And owning property in Greece is likely to become more expensive. Among the first austerity measures introduced by the country’s finance minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou is a new annual property tax which rises from 0.1 per cent on properties worth €400,000 to one per cent on properties worth €800,000 or more. So if you’re going to buy in Greece, it may well be worth looking at the lower end of the price spectrum.
19.03.2010
