The International Monetary Fund has put hard numbers on Greece’s housing squeeze. In a selected issues paper prepared for its periodic consultation with Athens and completed on April 30, the Fund finds that house prices have climbed about 85% since 2017 while disposable income per capita rose just 47%.
Most of that gap opened after the pandemic. Prices are up 61% since the fourth quarter of 2020, and the Fund puts current overvaluation at around 10%. Asking prices in Attica, Thessaloniki, and the tourist hubs sit well above the rest of the country.
Buying has moved out of reach for the typical household. On standard lending assumptions, the median household fell 7% to 17% short of the income needed to qualify for a mortgage in 2024, depending on the loan-to-value ratio applied.
Athens, Lisbon, Rome, and Limassol
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Athens🇬🇷 Greece
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Lisbon🇵🇹 Portugal
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Limassol🇨🇾 Cyprus
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Even where income clears that bar, the down payment is the wall. At a savings rate of 10% a year, accumulating it would take as long as 24 years.
Rents held steady longer, then turned. By 2025 rent inflation had reached 10%, and asking rents per square meter are climbing faster still, which points to more pressure on new leases ahead. Attica and Central Macedonia, the regions around Athens and Thessaloniki, feel it most acutely.
The cost burden now bites across the income scale. Median housing costs, mortgages included, passed a third of disposable income in 2025. Roughly two in five households spend more than 40% of their income on housing, the line economists use to define overburden, and another fifth spend between 30% and 40%.
Arrears tell the same story. Drawing on the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which it cautions may understate income, the Fund reports that 41.8% of households were behind on housing payments.
Risk falls hardest on low earners who rent or carry a mortgage: For that group, the modeled probability of overburden tops 90%, against about a third for higher-income households.
A shortage that coexists with abundance
The crisis sits on top of a glut. Greece has one of the highest dwelling counts per capita in the European Union, and more than 60% of households own their homes outright, with no mortgage at all. Yet 35% of the stock serves as something other than a primary residence, and 12% to 13% sits vacant.
Much of that empty stock cannot easily be lived in. More than half of unoccupied units predate 1980, and returning them to the market means renovation costs many owners cannot finance, on top of fragmented co-ownership and unresolved building-compliance issues that stall sales.
Energy efficiency makes it worse: Only 7.4% of Greek dwellings reach an energy rating of B or higher, and they burn around 65% more energy per square meter than Portuguese homes.
What is driving the imbalance
Demand for purchases has risen sharply since 2017, and the Fund traces most of it to investors rather than resident buyers. Foreign money came first, drawn by post-crisis valuations and the prospect of capital gains, and supported by the golden visa program alongside a clutch of tax incentives, from pensioner breaks to a lower unified property tax (ENFIA) since 2022.
Resident demand stayed shallow and skewed toward high-income households paying cash, though first-time buyers have returned since 2023 on the back of the subsidized MyHome loan programs.
There is more to the golden visa story than the inflows alone. Threshold changes generated “announcement effects,” the Fund finds, with investors rushing to buy before higher minimums took hold, then pulling back once they did. Greece raised those minimums to as much as €800,000 (approximately US$925,000) in its priciest zones under a 2024 reform that has already cooled program-linked purchases.
On the threshold increase itself, the Fund’s own evidence points the other way. It cites a 2026 study by Karamanis and co-authors finding that the higher minimums pushed investor activity into neighboring markets, a displacement of demand rather than any new supply of homes.
One channel does run toward supply, though it sits outside the Fund’s analysis. That reform also kept a €250,000 tier (approximately US$289,000) alive for converting commercial buildings to residential use, a route that has drawn golden visa capital into conversions estimated to add 3,000 to 5,000 homes across Athens by 2027. Those units are premium by definition: At €250,000 and up they sit in the price bracket the Fund says most Greeks cannot afford, so they widen the rental pool without easing affordability.
Why supply stays stuck
Supply has actually grown on paper. Listings for sale and for rent have risen markedly in recent years, the Fund finds, using data from the property platform Spitogatos. The mismatch lies in what is on offer: Demand has concentrated in smaller units and in metropolitan areas, above all Attica, where population density runs 20 times the national level.
New construction cannot close the gap quickly. High building costs and labor shortages slow it down, as does regulatory friction in zoning and permitting. Household formation keeps outpacing the population too, with the number of households rising even as the population shrinks, driven by a jump of 12 percentage points in single-person and single-parent households since 2011.
The policy response
Athens is pulling several levers at once. On the demand side, the Fund lists subsidized loans for first-time buyers, other help-to-buy support, and rental refunds; on the supply side, renovation programs and tax breaks meant to shift idle stock into the long-term rental market, alongside curbs on short-term rentals (STRs) in targeted areas.
Social housing and student accommodation are also planned, and the government is drafting a wider housing strategy built on a clearer map of need and stock.
The Fund’s own prescription leans hard toward supply. It wants Greece to mobilize the idle stock by pairing renovation incentives with penalties for leaving homes empty.
Equally, the staff call for an honest assessment of whether the short-term rental restrictions actually work, and for cutting the regulatory uncertainty that deters building. Whether any of it can outpace demand in Athens and Thessaloniki is the open question, and on current numbers the gap is not closing.
