More than 2.2 million housing There are gaps today. It is a percentage that exceeds one third of the country’s total mortgage, ranking it in the first place in the European Union in terms of inactive residences. At a time when in many other European countries the corresponding rates range between 10% and 15%.
The geographical distribution of these empty houses highlights five main regions, where almost 60% of the phenomenon is concentrated. Specifically, more than 500,000 closed houses are found in Attica, in Central Macedonia more than 360,000, followed by the Peloponnese, Western Greece and Thessaly. The contradiction is evident: At a time when tens of thousands of households find it difficult to find a roof, millions of square meters of houses remain unprofitable – inactive, abandoned or simply closed.
Age older stock
As the Blup Estate Analytics, a company specializing in the mapping of the real estate market, show, the largest percentage of houses that remain closed belong to older building generations. In particular, more than 3 million houses were built between 1961-1980, while another 1.6 million were erected in the 1980s. Over 1.1 million houses date from 1946–1960.
These houses, most of the time without energy insulation and with severe damage from time, do not meet modern living standards. Their renovation is considered by many owners economically unprofitable. Result: remain closed, trapped in a peculiar stillness.
The causes that lead a house to remain empty are many and often overlapping. Much of the empty houses concerns cottages and secondary uses – houses that are inhabited a few weeks a year and remain inactive. Another piece concerns old, worn houses in areas without high demand or with limited infrastructure. There are also real estate with legal issues – cases of unspecified hereditary status, co -owners’ disagreements or heavy tax burdens that are deterrent to the property of the property.
To all of this, a newer trend is added: the flowering of short -term Airbnb leases, which pushes many owners to withdraw their homes from long -term lease, leaving them virtually closed out of tourist season.
As Vassilis Iliopoulos, founder of Blup Estate Analytics points out, is not quantitative but institutional: “The solution is not to build more. Before expanding to new plots, we must bring back to life the existing residential fabric. The first step is the recording: a national register of residential, digital and accessible, to know what we have, where it is and what is it. “
At the same time, he argues, targeted tax incentives are required (ENFIA Reductions, Divisions, Energy Upgrading Subsidies), as well as co -financed renovation programs to make the use of thousands of houses that are now unprofitable.
Finally, the role of Local Government may prove critical: “Municipalities can function as intermediate administrators, concentrate inactive real estate and direct them to social housing: for students, single parent families, the elderly,” said.
A problem silent but not invisible
In fact, the crisis of housing in Greece is not a crisis of availability. The residential stock exists – and it is large. What is missing is the mechanisms that will activate it. Without a substantial policy for the exploitation of existing houses, empty houses will continue to stand as silent monuments of a home that has a home, but it cannot house its people.