Sitting at a computer in Athens, the Greek capital, 69-year-old architect Tonia Katerini looks through property contracts. Through these deals, she says, the neighbourhood she has known for so long is being transformed.
The Exarchia district of Athens has long been known for its left-wing politics. But flats there are now being bought one after another and turned into short-term rentals, and local residents are being forced out of their homes.
For several months, Katerini and some of her neighbours have been going through public records to gather information on property purchases by foreigners. From it they have built a digital map on which properties bought by foreigners are marked with red dots.
Zooming out from her own street, Katerini shows the map: countless red dots spread across the whole area. The balcony door of the flat she has lived in since 1986 is open, and the chatter of the cafes below drifts in. Inside, architectural drawings are piled beside the plants.
Katerini and her colleagues say much of the money invested in these short-term lets has come from Israeli investors. By their count, more than half of the company-run hotels and rental homes newly opened in the area are owned by Israelis.
In a district where flags of solidarity with Palestine hang from balconies and protest slogans cover the walls, Israeli investment has created fresh tension.
Now, she says, she is woken every morning by the sound of tourists’ suitcases being wheeled along. Israeli investors have bought two buildings on her street, she says, and the flat directly below hers is owned by a company. “The people downstairs are nice people. But the company is Israeli,” Katerini says.
A few streets away, the wall of a residential building is daubed in black: “Airbnb is making us homeless.” Another slogan reads: “Zionists not welcome.”
Such buildings are easy to spot. Instead of residents’ names, as on an ordinary apartment block, the doorbells carry only numbers, and Airbnb guests collect their keys from a special keypad beside the door.
Campaigners have been splashing red paint on the entrances and keypads of buildings in the area in protest. They say the short-term rental business is aggressively gentrifying the district, pushing rents beyond ordinary people’s reach, driving out local residents and erasing the area’s identity.
Foreign investment in Greek property
Foreign investment in Greece’s property sector has risen sharply in recent years. According to the Bank of Greece, investment by non-resident foreigners in Greek property reached a record 2.75 billion euros in 2024. The pace slowed somewhat the following year.
There are no official figures on how much property people of each nationality are buying in Athens. But the Greek weekly To Vima reported that, according to an annual survey by the estate agency network RE/MAX Hellas, Israelis are the top foreign buyers in Attica, the region around the capital, followed by buyers from Turkey and Lebanon.
Exarchia also has a long history of political activism. In 1973, students at the nearby Athens Polytechnic rose up against the US-backed military government, which fell the following year.
In 2008, a 15-year-old Greek student, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, was shot dead by police in Exarchia, and protests spread across the country. In Katerini’s words, it was like “a fire on dry land”.
As Greece’s debt crisis deepened, that anger on the streets paved the way for the left-wing party Syriza to come to power in 2015.
“Tenants evicted overnight”
Chrysoula Papageorgiou, a 46-year-old schoolteacher, has lived in Exarchia for 24 years and is a familiar face on its streets. She remembers Exarchia as “a neighbourhood of mutual solidarity”.
The change came slowly at first, she says, then quickly gathered pace. At first, owners let out a spare room. But after the coronavirus pandemic, companies began buying whole buildings.
“Overnight tenants were evicted, and one residential building after another was emptied,” Papageorgiou says.
New bars have opened on once-quiet streets, with tables and chairs spread across the pavements, and rents have gone up. Migrants and low-income families, many of whom lived in basements or on ground floors, were the first forced to leave.
Local schools have fewer pupils, and old bookshops, traditional cafes and grocers have closed. For years, Exarchia residents sheltered refugees in squatted buildings. Papageorgiou says these buildings, on valuable land, were the first targets of police evictions and were later sold. “Once, half the buildings were squats. Now there is only one,” she says.
Painted sheets hang on that last squat with messages of solidarity for the families inside, and neighbours together make sure the children there go to school.
Since 2022, Exarchia Square, long the centre of the district’s protests, has been fenced off for the construction of a new metro station, a project many residents opposed. Riot police have become an everyday sight, Papageorgiou says.
She believes the aim is to make central Athens “entirely dependent on tourism”. In recent years, she says, the buyers of property have been “almost all Israeli”.
A large Palestinian flag hangs near the square. Some tourists have written anti-Palestinian messages on its white stripe, which campaigners later paint over.
Katerini believes foreign investors see Greece as a safer place to keep their money than Israel, and that in Athens “the government is also very friendly towards Israel”. In August, Greece signed a $3.5 billion missile deal with Israel.
A “great opportunity” for investors
Vangelis Lazaridis, head of a branch of the Athens-Attica Real Estate Agents Association, says there are real economic reasons behind investment in Exarchia.
The area was once neglected, he says, which made it a “great opportunity” for investment.
It is well placed, close to the centre of Athens, to metro stations and to universities full of foreign students. And unlike Plaka, below the Acropolis, there are few restrictions on building and renovation.
Once a few buyers start investing in an area, others follow, Lazaridis says. The Greek government has now moved to cool the housing market.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced last month that the property transfer tax on home purchases by citizens of countries outside the European Union will rise from 3 per cent to 15 per cent from July next year.
In a recent report on the move, the Jerusalem Post wrote that “the party in Greece is over”. In recent years, it said, Greece had become a popular destination for Israeli investors hoping for attractive returns on relatively cheap property, but the new tax would make the country less attractive.
Lazaridis says estate agents’ associations oppose the plan, which has not yet become law. He thinks it may not take effect, or may be delayed.
The Greek news outlet in.gr reported that agents expect some non-EU buyers to rush to buy property before the new tax takes effect.
But not everyone in the property business thinks this wave of foreign investment cannot be stopped.
Iryna Rondiak, from Ukraine, runs her own estate agency near Exarchia. She says Israeli buyers began arriving about a decade ago and made up about 60 per cent of her foreign clients. Many bought whole office buildings and turned them into hotels.
By Rondiak’s count, foreign buyers were involved in about 70 per cent of her total sales up to 2024. This year that share has fallen to about 30 per cent.
She credits “Spiti mou” (“My home”), a government housing loan scheme for young people, through which young Greeks can buy homes with state support.
Rondiak believes some new restrictions have also helped change the situation.
According to To Vima, no new short-term rental licences are being issued in central Athens, including Exarchia. In September the ban was extended to the end of 2027.
Property bought under Greece’s “golden visa” residence scheme can now only be let long-term. But the scheme’s benefits are still available through a cheaper route: investing 250,000 euros to convert empty office buildings into residential flats.
“Even people living in Greece could not find a home to live in in the central areas. Everything had become Airbnb. Now there are far fewer of these rentals,” Rondiak says.
In her view things are “a bit better”, but the problem is not fully solved.
Even in the southern suburbs, she says, rents are 10 to 15 euros a square metre. Because of the tax burden, many owners do not find letting profitable, so many flats stand empty.
Local residents, however, are still not optimistic.
They say the ban on short-term rentals is temporary, and investors with enough money can still find ways into the market. Besides, many buildings in the area have already become short-term rentals, and the new ban cannot undo the changes of the past.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report