The Greek Government has said it would give a three-year tax break to homeowners who converted their short-term rentals to long-term ones.
As part of a plan to tackle housing shortages, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on September 8 that Greece also planned to increase a tax on short-term rentals and ban new rental licences in central Athens.
Residents in the capital have responded positively. “It’s a huge issue because it’s changing the urban landscape. Where there are traditional buildings, now there’s a modern one next to them, designed to be an Airbnb,” said 58-years old Athens resident Penny Platanitou.
VIDEO: Is rent really “too damn high?”
Join @JustinStares – Brussels Signal’s head of news – as he breaks down the housing crisis in Europe. https://t.co/AEhNAnNrni
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) September 12, 2024
Valentina Reino, head of public policy for Airbnb in Southern Europe, said on September 13 that her company was ready to work with the Greek Government on “targeted and proportionate solutions”.
In tourist-heavy cities, short-term rentals by firms such as Airbnb have made the housing crisis worse.
Europe’s short-term rental boom has already prompted tourism hotspots such as Spain’s Canary Islands, Lisbon, Berlin and Florence to announce restrictions on such lets, which many local people have blamed for pricing permanent residents out of the market.
Low wages, high inflation, property shortages and agrowth in short-term holiday rentals have fuelled a housing crisis in a Greece still recuperating from almost a decade-long debt crisis. Low-income earners, young couples and students have been hit particularly hard.
Greece has spent €2.2 billion so far to subsidise low-interest loans to help young people on to the property ladder and is set to earmark an additional €2 billion to extend the plan to couples up to 50 years old.
“Greece, indeed, has joined that team of countries in recent years where the housing shortage is pushing families unbearably,” Sofia Zacharaki, Greece’s minister for social cohesion and family affairs, told a press conference on September 13 regarding present the plan.
On July 21, protestors marched through the city carrying models of cruise ships and aeroplanes, depicting the main forms of transport used to reach the island.https://t.co/EEsvoyeg8r
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) July 22, 2024
