Houses exist, but they don’t rent! Thousands of properties remain closed or are put into short-term rentals, and the market is drying up. As a result, Greece is facing a shortfall of around 180,000 homes compared to 2011 (according to a survey by Piraeus Bank), with the market talking about an unprecedented housing suffocation.

The picture painted by ELSTAT is revealing. Of the country’s 6.6 million homes, 4.3 million are used as primary residences. Of the remaining 2.2 million, 857,000 are holiday homes, 627,000 are secondary, 327,000 are vacant, and some 466,000 are declared “for sale or rent”. But, as brokers and market operators point out, a large proportion of these cannot be used: they are old, unrenovated, energy-intensive, or entangled in titles and inheritances.

Meanwhile, short-term leases have removed some 208,000 properties from the long-term market, according to Piraeus. In Athens, especially in the center and in tourist neighborhoods, availability has all but disappeared. In Thessaloniki, where short-term rentals have spread to areas around universities and the waterfront, permanent tenants find few options. On islands such as Santorini and Mykonos, the situation has reached an extreme: tourism workers are forced to share houses or stay in makeshift solutions because Airbnb is sucking up almost all the stock.

All of the accommodation in the city is running out of space.
The structure doesn’t follow. With just 35,000 new homes a year, the shortfall is hard to make up. Developers warn that with building permits down 50% in 2025, “production is frozen” and the problem will only get worse. Piraeus Bank estimates that at this rate it will take at least five years to fill the gap, although the picture suggests the trend is downward.

Social pressure is suffocating. The Bank of Greece records that one in three households spends more than 40% of their income on housing, the worst performance in the EU. Landlords through POMIDA stress that without incentives for renovations and solutions to inheritances, thousands of flats will be left unoccupied. Estate agents are calling for rules to put limits on short-term renting in certain areas, while developers are pushing for accelerated licensing, investment in regeneration, and new affordable housing schemes.

The picture that emerges is that the crisis is not just about prices but more importantly about availability. Hundreds of thousands of homes are off the long-term market, and the 180,000-home deficit shows that the housing problem is structural.