“All projects are progressing as we would have liked and had planned against a very difficult construction market.”

“We want on Christmas 2026 to have people living in Hellinikon and certainly in 2027 there will be a lot of life especially in the whole coastal zone. What we have brought to the market in terms of housing is going away. As a result, as we know the houses in the three zones of the coastal front have all been sold and even in the new residential neighborhood ‘Little Athens’ where apartments are coming out gradually from the end of 2023, the pre-sales have reached 65% already. They could even reach 100% but our sales can’t keep up, they will be running through July.”

These are some of the quotes at yesterday’s general meeting from Odysseus Athanasiou, CEO of LAMDA Development, about the project the company is “running” within the former Hellinikon airport and is progressing at all levels at the moment. Asked about any delays, he said that everything is going according to plan, while there may be delays, for example, in the infrastructure part as the projects progress, e.g. in terms of (re)designing networks, since everything is done from scratch.

“The skyscraper with 173 apartments – all sold – has already reached the 6th floor on one side and the 4th floor on the other, also already the 6th from low buildings of the coastal front can be seen and by autumn 15 will be seen. From the pre-sales in the three residential neighborhoods of the coastal front come the receipts that have so far reached 700 million euros. The health of the company is also shown by the fact that having 2.5 years of work underway on the project, it has 600 million euros available in its coffers, while at the same time it has not received any borrowing despite having lines with the banks and proceeding with whatever real estate liquidations are made.”

Athanasiou took questions from shareholders on the issue of share price performance, which he said he acknowledged has underperformed relative to a stock market that has outperformed despite the fact that LAMDA’s fundamentals are currently better than ever. One of the main reasons, according to him, is that foreign investors do not prefer real estate company stocks at the current juncture; given the turmoil in the sector across Europe as opposed to Greece which experienced the collapse of real estate during the country’s fiscal crisis and is now moving against the rest of Europe.