Against the new extension of “ceiling» 3% at the expense of small and medium-sized property is set by the Panhellenic Federation of Property Owners (POMIDA), according to today’s (10.12.2024) letter to the Minister of Development Mr. Panagiotis Theodorikakos.
In particular, POMIDA asked Mr. Theodorikakos not to extend even for a single day the unilateral and unacceptable imposition of a 3% “ceiling” on commercial rents in 2025 as well,
According to the letter, the antisocial perversity of imposing a “cap” lies in the fact that it relentlessly destroys small owners while blatantly favoring large ones.
POMIDA’s letter to the Minister of Development
“Dear Minister, yesterday we read in the press the letter of the new President of ESEE Mr. Stavrou Kafounis, with which he asked you for a new extension of the determination of the maximum rate of increase of 3% of commercial rents for the year 2025.
This measure, as is known, was imposed for the first time by article 121 of Law 4926/22 for the year 2022, due to the sudden increases in energy bills and was imposed exclusively at the expense of small and medium-sized shop and office owners, while it was expressly excluded from it all the great business and investment real estate! Subsequently, this supposedly temporary measure was legislatively extended for the next 2023 and 2024, without any counterweight in favor of its victims and while the reasons for its establishment had ceased to exist.
Thus, this measure brought to despair a significant number of landlords who cannot even collect the rents agreed in euros, and who from the amounts of the rents they do not collect are obliged to pay the heaviest income tax, which you did not change in not to mention the “confiscating” literally rent scale, which reaches up to 45% without tax. To pay the ENFIA – which in some cases you increased dramatically due to the new objective values but also for those who have assets over 400,000 euros – as well as the loan obligations of those who struggle to be consistent with them, despite the difficulties and increases they face .
On the contrary, on the side of the professionals favored by this regulation, you have received and are receiving heaps of rich measures to support them, while moreover the measure in question does not seem to have finally contributed to stopping the price increases of products – even essential ones – during the last three years .
Our opinion, Mr. Minister, which is based on our experience over the last 40 years or more, is that, as long as the economy of our country is progressing, a fact promoted by your Government and recognized by international rating agencies, and since D.T. K. which at the time of the adoption of the measure in question exceeded 10%, while it now stands at a rate of around 2.5-3.00%, no such intervention is needed anymore, given that this market self-regulates much faster and more effectively through the consensus of the parties concerned, rather than any kind of state interventions, which, although imposed as supposedly temporary, inevitably carry within them the seed of the long-term and destructive tenement practices of the past, which literally ruined the building potential of our country…
That is why we call on you, Mr. Minister, not to extend even for a day this unilateral and unacceptable regulation, the anti-social distortion of which lies in the fact that it relentlessly destroys the small owners while blatantly favoring the big ones! The best and most effective intervention that you as a government can and must do in favor of tenants and the level of rents, is finally the drastic rationalization of the tax scale of the income of small and medium owners of rented commercial properties and not the continuous adoption of unilateral and burdensome measures against them, which foreshadow Tenement”.