Kyriakos Pierrakakis put a date and a limit on the measure his prime minister had announced two days earlier in Thessaloniki. “This measure, I want to stress, will take effect from July 1, 2027, because our aim is not to catch the market by surprise,” the finance minister said at Monday’s presentation of the package. “And let me also specify that it will concern natural and not legal persons.”
Six months later than the January date that followed the Thessaloniki announcement, then, and close to ten months from announcement to the day the rate bites. Deputy Minister Dimitris Markopoulos said the interval gives transfers already underway time to finish.
Companies escape. As scoped, the 15% rate reaches residential purchases by natural persons who are citizens of countries outside the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA). Markopoulos added two exclusions in the same breath: “Ethnic Greeks are exempt, long-term residents are exempt.”
Add the 3% municipal surcharge and the real burden runs to 15.45%, against 3.09% today. The ministry worked its own examples. Main transfer tax, before the municipal surcharge:
- €200,000 home: €30,000, up from €6,000
- €500,000 home: €75,000, up from €15,000
- €800,000 home: €120,000, up from €24,000
Third-country money in Greek real estate came to €1.2 billion last year, roughly €800 million of it residential.
The vote, and then the ballot box
This increase travels inside the omnibus bill carrying every Thessaloniki measure, due in public consultation within the month. Parliament’s term runs to spring 2027, and Mitsotakis has not picked between March and May.
Christina Georgaki, founder and managing partner of Georgaki Law Firm, reads the deferral as pushing the whole thing past the election. “The law got pushed after elections,” she says, which would leave passage to a majority in a parliament nobody has voted for yet.
She says that on the reported timetable, the vote comes first and the ballot second, which leaves something subtler: A law on the books that an incoming government could unpick before it ever takes effect.
Alexander Varnavas treats that as the live risk. “A new government may choose a different direction, probably even worse,” says the managing partner of Varnavas Law Firm.
“He still expects Mitsotakis to win the elections and to look hard at implementation, since “their approach is highly supportive of investment.”
Everyone wants the €250,000 tier out
Conversions and listed-building restorations sit at €250,000 under points (c) and (d) of paragraph 2 of Article 100 of Law 5038/2023, an exception to thresholds that otherwise reach €800,000. Commercial premises stay at 3.09%. Nobody yet knows how a building gets classified at the moment it changes hands, once the conversion is finished.
Elena Shiapani wants the category carved out. Converting idle industrial and commercial stock “brings existing assets back into productive use, revitalizes areas, and increases the availability of rental housing,” says the MIBS Group chief executive, and does it without new land.
Taxation, she adds, “should be carefully calibrated so that it does not unintentionally weaken the broader real estate market or Greece’s attractiveness as an investment destination.”
Varnavas Law Firm published a position on September 7 making the same case out of the government’s own words. Mitsotakis had told his Thessaloniki press conference that the state should work out “how we can take old industrial buildings and allow their use to be converted into residential housing.” Taxing the investors financing exactly that would be “contradictory,” the firm argues.
Geography is Varnavas Law Firm’s second ask. The increase should be “targeted at those areas where the housing problem is most acute, primarily Athens and Thessaloniki, rather than being imposed indiscriminately nationwide.” Island and regional markets run substantially on holiday-home sales to foreigners and face nothing resembling Athenian rent pressure.
Greek market bodies are preparing to request either the exemption or a middle rate, possibly 8%.
Georgaki expects a ceiling instead
Georgaki’s forecast has a different shape. She expects the rate to apply only to properties worth up to €500,000, “so as to prevent foreign investors from competing with local buyers.” The segment competing with Greek households is the cheaper one.
Absent a ceiling, the pain lands at the top. Large developments such as Ellinikon are where “the tax figures will skyrocket,” she says.
On demand, they do not agree
Varnavas expects the mix to move. Most future applicants “will likely focus on financial investments or the 250k options,” on his reading, assuming those tiers escape.
Shiapani expects nothing of the sort. “Honestly, we do not expect a significant shift in that direction,” she says. The entry price has not changed: “Even with a potential 12% increase in the overall purchase cost, the minimum investment threshold remains at €250,000.”
Greeks and foreigners alike paid a 10% transaction tax until the 2014 reform cut it to 3%, Georgaki points out. “I do not believe that it will have a major impact on the demand,” she says.
Cost is not what would move volumes, in her account. A rival would: Greek numbers fall only if another member state fields a better real estate route, and “Greece is the undoubted leader in this field.”
Nobody expects the queues back
Ten months of warning ought to produce a filing rush. Neither Shiapani nor Georgaki sees the backlog that once defined the program returning with it.
That bottleneck was structural, Shiapani says. Investors “could only submit their applications in the area where they had made their investment,” which piled files onto Athens. Today they “can submit their applications through the local office of their choice anywhere in Greece.”
Georgaki is shorter about it. “I think the processing system is very well organised at the moment and we will not face any more backlogs in the future,” she says.
What happens before June 30
Varnavas expects the announcement to work backwards on the market. It “will give a boost to the market, as investors planning to proceed within the next couple of years will accelerate their plans.”
Buyers have until June 30, 2027, at 3.09%. A €250,000 conversion carries €7,725 in transfer tax on that side of the line and €38,625 on the other.
Which of those two numbers applies to the golden visa’s cheapest route will be settled in the consultation draft, due next month.
