Foreign buyers' rush sparks anger in Athens' Exarchia as rents drive residents out

Anger is growing among residents of Athens' historic Exarchia district over a rush of foreign investors buying up homes. Activists say the short-term rental business is sending rents soaring, erasing the neighbourhood's character and forcing out the people who have long lived there.

Tonia Katerini, a 69-year-old architect who has lived in a flat in the district since 1986, scrolled through property contracts that she says are remaking her neighbourhood. For months, she and a group of neighbours have been digitally mapping foreign purchases using public records, marking them with red dots. Zoom out on her street, and the map is a sea of red.

In a neighbourhood known for its radical left-wing politics, where Palestinian flags hang from balconies and solidarity slogans cover the walls, Katerini's group says much of the money behind the rentals is Israeli; by their count, more than half of the area's new company-run hotels and rentals are backed by such investment. That has caused friction.

On her own cobbled street, Israeli investors have bought two buildings, she said, and the flat below hers belongs to one such company. 'They are nice guys we have downstairs,' she said. 'It's an Israeli company.'

A few streets away, a residential building is streaked with black paint. 'Airbnbs leave us homeless,' reads one slogan across its facade; 'Zionists not welcome,' reads another. Such buildings are easy to spot: instead of residents' names, the buzzer panels show only numbers, and a keypad by the door releases keys for Airbnb guests. Activists have also splattered keypads and facades with red paint.

Foreign money has poured into Greek property in recent years. Non-residents invested a record 2.75 billion euros ($3.2bn) in Greek real estate in 2024, according to the Bank of Greece, before easing last year.

No official figures break down foreign buyers in Athens by nationality. But an annual survey of completed sales by the agency network RE/MAX Hellas found that Israelis were the largest group of foreign buyers in Attica, the region around the capital, ahead of buyers from Turkiye and Lebanon, the Greek weekly To Vima reported.

Exarchia's political activism runs deep. In 1973, students at the nearby Athens Polytechnic rose up against the US-backed military government, which fell the following year. In 2008, police shot dead Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, in Exarchia, provoking protests that spread across the country—an event that came, Katerini said, like 'fire on dry land'. As the debt crisis deepened, that anger helped propel the left-wing Syriza party to power in 2015.

Chrysoulla Papageorgiou, a 46-year-old schoolteacher who has lived in Exarchia for 24 years, remembers it as 'a neighbourhood of solidarity'. The change came slowly, then quickened. At first, small owners rented out a spare room. After the COVID-19 pandemic, companies began buying entire blocks. 'Overnight, tenants were displaced and apartment blocks emptied,' she said.

As rents rose, migrants and low-income families—many living in basements and on the lower floors—were the first to go. Schools lost pupils and old bookshops, traditional cafes and grocers closed. For years, residents sheltered refugees in occupied buildings; sitting on prime real estate, those were among the first buildings police emptied and then sold. 'Half were squats,' she said. 'Now we have only one.'

Since 2022, Exarchia Square, long the heart of the neighbourhood's protests, has been a fenced-off construction site for a new metro station that many residents fought against. The aim, Papageorgiou believes, is to turn central Athens into somewhere 'purely touristic', and riot police are now a daily presence.

Foreign buyers, Katerini said, see Greece as a safer place for their money than Israel itself, and in Athens 'the government is very friendly with Israel'. In August, Athens signed a missile deal with Israel worth $3.5bn. Vagelis Lazaridis, a real estate agent who heads a branch of the Athens-Attica Real Estate Agents' Association, insists the reasons for the investments are purely practical: the area 'was a run-down area', close to the centre, the metro and universities, with few of the building restrictions found in Plaka beneath the Acropolis.

The government is now trying to cool the market. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced last month that the transfer tax for homebuyers from outside the European Union would rise from 3 percent to 15 percent from next July. 'The party is over in Greece,' The Jerusalem Post wrote in a recent report. Agents' associations, however, oppose the plan, which has yet to become law; Lazaridis says it 'may not take effect, or may be postponed'.

Not everyone in the trade sees an unstoppable tide. Iryna Rondyak, an estate agent originally from Ukraine, said that when Israeli buyers began arriving about a decade ago they made up about 60 percent of her foreign clients, and until around 2024 foreigners accounted for about 70 percent of her sales. This year the figure is about 30 percent, as state-backed mortgages for young Greeks under a scheme called 'Spiti mou' (My Home) bring local buyers back.

No new short-term rental licences are being issued in central Athens, including Exarchia, and in September the freeze was extended to the end of 2027, To Vima reported. Properties bought under Greece's 'golden visa' residency scheme can now only be let long-term. 'Anyone living in Greece couldn't find a home in the centre. Everything was on Airbnb,' Rondyak said. 'Now there are far fewer.'

Rents, however, remain high—at 10 to 15 euros ($12 to $17) per square metre, even in the southern suburbs. Many flats sit empty because owners find renting them out is not worth the tax bill. And the freeze is temporary, while it does not undo what has already happened: many of the neighbourhood's buildings are already short-term rentals.

Papageorgiou counts herself lucky. Her landlady, whose family has lived in the area for generations, refuses to raise the rent as an 'act of resistance'. Papageorgiou jokes that the landlady's accountant has told her she is ruining the market.