Greece’s main opposition party wants property purchases out of the country’s golden visa program.
Nikos Androulakis, leader of the center-left PASOK, presented a parliamentary amendment last week that would abolish the real estate route of the Greece Golden Visa and steer foreign capital toward a proposed “Angel Visa” tied to productive business investment.
Tabled during the plenary debate on a Development Ministry bill, the amendment has three parts, according to CNN Greece. It would end investor residence permits for property acquisitions and redirect incentives toward Greek businesses and entrepreneurship. Existing golden visa holders would also fall under the short-term rental ban once their five-year permits come up for renewal.
“The Golden Visa was established in the years of the crisis as an emergency medicine,” Androulakis told lawmakers. “Today, however, this medicine has become poison,” he added.
In his rebuttal, he took aim at the €250,000 tier for commercial-to-residential conversions, arguing that such purchases absorb homes that could otherwise go to students and families.
He also called for the short-term rental ban to apply retroactively.
Government Dismisses the Proposal
The ruling New Democracy party brushed the amendment aside. Its parliamentary spokesman, Notis Mitarakis, who helped legislate the original program in 2013, told Androulakis that PASOK’s amendments showed it had not properly read what was happening, according to local media reports.
PASOK had welcomed the program when it launched, Mitarakis argued, yet now refuses to acknowledge the government’s reforms. Those measures, in his account, already keep golden visa buyers from competing for the homes most Greeks are looking for.
With just over 30 deputies in the 300-seat parliament, PASOK cannot pass the amendment without New Democracy’s votes. Mitarakis gave little sign those votes will come.
A Familiar Campaign, a Familiar Alternative
Androulakis has campaigned against the program since December 2023, when he accused the government of running the prime minister’s office like a real estate agency. Four months later, PASOK voted for the amendment that raised thresholds to their current levels.
The Angel Visa first surfaced in June at the annual general meeting of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV), where Androulakis called for investor visas to reward research, innovation, and startups.
By September, abolishing the property route had become one of the party’s headline pledges at the Thessaloniki International Fair.
Greece already offers something close to what the party is proposing. Since January 2025, non-EU investors have been able to qualify by putting €250,000 into startups registered on the state’s Elevate Greece platform, subject to job-creation conditions; PASOK’s statements on the amendment do not explain how the Angel Visa would differ.
“A Distinctly Different Segment”
Christina Georgaki of Georgaki Law Firm disputes the premise.
The program “has not been shown to be a primary driver of Greece’s housing crisis,” she tells IMI, and the conversion route Androulakis attacked arguably works in the opposite direction, since turning non-residential buildings into homes “can contribute to increasing the available housing stock.”
Price also separates the two markets. The €800,000 minimum that applies in Attica, Thessaloniki, Mykonos, Santorini, and larger islands sits “well above the budget typically available to the average Greek household,” in Georgaki’s view, which places those investors in “a distinctly different segment of the property market.”
She also reads the amendment as opposition politics. A party out of government, Georgaki notes, enjoys “greater latitude to put forward policy positions without currently bearing responsibility for their implementation.”
Greek public opinion of the program appears “relatively positive,” she adds, with criticism linking it to housing coming “largely from parties on the left.”
How Much Housing Do Investors Actually Hold?
Greece counted 34,278 active investor permits at the end of July. The 2021 census by statistics authority ELSTAT recorded 6,596,758 dwellings. If every permit stood for a property investment, golden visa investors would hold roughly 0.5% of the national housing stock.
Some permits rest on non-property investments, while some pre-2024 investors combined several apartments to reach the threshold. Either way, the order of magnitude holds; tax records list 7.3 million residential properties, which would push the share lower still.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told parliament in February 2024 that about 7% of property sales were linked to the program, and an Athens University of Economics and Business study put the share at 10.77% for 2023 and 2024.
Demand is also concentrated. Attica accounted for 5,730 of the pending applications at the end of July, and a Bank of Greece working paper found that the old €250,000 minimum acted as a price anchor, with sales clustering around it until the threshold rose.
Foreign buying does not hinge on the visa, however. Foreign capital flowing into Greek real estate rose 43.4% year-on-year to €511.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, according to Bank of Greece figures, even as golden visa applications fell.
The Spanish Precedent
Georgaki points to Spain as a caution, saying that housing affordability has become a challenge across Europe, “including countries where investor-residency programs have been restricted or abolished.”
Spain, “despite ending its golden visa program,” still faces housing as “a major political and social issue,” she notes.
Spain closed its program to new applicants on April 3, 2025. Eighteen months later, Congress’s rejection of two government housing decrees has triggered a snap election for November 29.
Government figures there linked roughly 14,600 golden visas to real estate between 2013 and 2023. Spain recorded more than five million home sales over the same period.
A Program Already Remade
Athens has tightened the program repeatedly. Law 5100/2024 raised the minimum to €800,000 (approximately US$930,000) in Attica, Thessaloniki, Mykonos, Santorini, and islands of more than 3,100 inhabitants, and to €400,000 elsewhere, both requiring a single property of at least 120 square meters.
A €250,000 tier survives for conversions and for listed buildings under restoration.
The same law banned short-term letting of golden visa properties, backed by a €50,000 fine and revocation of the permit.
Law 5275/2026, in force since February, made the five-year permit run from its issue date instead of backdating it to the filing date.
Demand has adjusted accordingly. New applications fell 39% in the first seven months of 2026, with most now arriving through the conversion route, and the backlog shrank to 29,273 files by the end of July.
Earlier reforms had already sent nearly 15,000 of roughly 16,000 investor-acquired homes into long-term leases.
The government made its own announcement at the Thessaloniki International Fair in September. Under a proposal that is not yet law, non-EU nationals buying residential property would pay a 15% transfer tax instead of 3% from July 1, 2027, with the government citing foreign demand’s role in rising prices.
As drafted, the tax would cover individual golden visa buyers, raising the bill on an €800,000 Athens purchase from about €24,000 to €120,000. The market is pressing for an exemption or a reduced rate on €250,000 conversion units, arguing that they add new homes rather than absorb existing ones.
On golden visas themselves, the government’s housing strategy runs the other way from PASOK’s amendment. Greece’s National Housing Policy Strategy 2026–2035, published in the Government Gazette on August 17, proposes a golden visa category that would let investors spread the qualifying sum across several properties, provided all of them go to long-term tenants.
