The Largest Untapped Asset in Greece Is Already Built

By Elias Makris, Partner and Head of Real Estate

Elias Makris

More than 526,000 properties across Attica remain vacant or inactive, according to Hellenic Statistical Authority data, representing approximately 27% of the region's residential stock. At the same time, broader estimates suggest that more than 2.2 million properties remain vacant and underutilized across Greece.

In central Athens alone, approximately 117,000 homes remain empty while housing affordability pressures continue to intensify and the supply of modern residential product remains limited.

The problem in Greece is not the absence of buildings. It is the inability to reactivate them.

The Market Has Changed Faster Than Urban Planning

Over the last years, Greece introduced several housing and energy-upgrade programs focused primarily on occupied, owner-occupied homes. While these initiatives supported energy modernization, they did little to address the country's vast inactive building stock.

By contrast, the Golden Visa change-of-use framework demonstrated that adaptive reuse can attract foreign capital, reactivate inactive assets, and create new residential supply within the existing urban fabric. Yet significant operational obstacles remain. Co-owner approvals, façade interventions, architectural council reviews, and inconsistent interpretations by planning authorities continue to create uncertainty and delay.

As a result, investment activity increasingly concentrates on standalone buildings, dramatically limiting the broader pool of urban assets that could otherwise be repositioned and reactivated.

The market has changed. Urban planning has not.

Entire districts remain excluded from residential conversion because zoning frameworks no longer reflect the economic and social reality of the areas themselves. Greece's gradual deindustrialization, combined with the rapid evolution of technology, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence, fundamentally altered the productive role of many urban buildings. Thousands of former commercial and industrial spaces lost their original purpose years ago, yet the planning framework surrounding them often remains frozen in a previous economic era.

Urban planning frameworks cannot continue operating based on the economic realities of a Greece that no longer exists.

Historically, planning reforms in Greece evolved within a framework of institutional caution and fragmented administration, often resulting in prolonged approval timelines and limited planning flexibility. The result is an urban environment that struggles to evolve strategically and coherently.

Building Density Policies Present an Equally Critical Barrier

Current planning policy continues, to a large extent, the restrictive approach of maintaining particularly low building coefficients, even in areas supported by strong infrastructure and public transportation networks.

While protecting the urban environment remains essential, excessively restrictive density policies directly affect the economic viability of urban regeneration projects. They also limit new housing supply in areas where real demand exists, further intensifying affordability pressures.

This becomes even more critical when viewed through the lens of international institutional capital and the global multifamily housing asset class, one of the world's largest real estate investment sectors. In Greece, low density coefficients and small project scales severely limit the creation of institutionally investable multifamily assets, effectively excluding the country from a significant portion of international capital seeking exposure to this product type.

Restrictive density limitations also constrain architectural quality itself. The pressure to maximize limited surfaces within rigid planning frameworks frequently produces compromised outcomes instead of integrated and aesthetically meaningful urban developments.

Reactivating Existing Buildings Is Already an Act of Sustainability

The discussion around urban reactivation can no longer be separated from sustainability and environmental impact.

Europe's green transition policies introduced increasingly strict environmental standards across the real estate and construction sectors. However, these policies also exposed significant challenges, particularly in markets such as Greece, where much of the building stock is old, fragmented across multiple owners, and often technically difficult or economically inefficient to fully transform according to demanding international certification standards.

In reality, Greece's EPC framework and existing energy-efficiency regulations already impose demanding upgrade standards on both new and existing buildings.

Adaptive reuse is no longer an alternative strategy. In many cities, it has become the only realistic path toward urban regeneration.

More importantly, adaptive reuse itself is already a meaningful act of sustainability. Preserving existing structural frameworks, avoiding demolition, and reducing the need for new construction materials significantly lowers embodied carbon — the environmental footprint already embedded within a building's lifecycle.

Cities do not become sustainable only by constructing new buildings, but by intelligently extending the life of the ones they already have.

What Needs to Change

The solution does not lie in uncontrolled deregulation or aggressive overdevelopment. Greece does not need to abandon urban controls. It needs a planning framework that is faster, clearer, and more aligned with the economic and social realities of modern cities.

In practical terms, this means accelerating change-of-use approvals through standardized municipal review timelines, updating zoning in districts like Metaxourgeio and Gazi where industrial designations no longer match economic reality, and linking density increases to demonstrated infrastructure capacity around metro stations and major transportation corridors.

At the same time, adaptive reuse projects should be evaluated not only through the lens of procedural compliance, but also through their broader contribution to housing supply, sustainability, urban safety, and economic productivity.

The goal is not to build indiscriminately. The goal is to allow cities to evolve intelligently.

Greece Has the Building Stock — But Not Yet the Framework

Many of these issues are not theoretical observations but daily realities for those actively involved in urban redevelopment and adaptive reuse projects.

Through our work on building conversions and urban repositioning across Athens, we witness daily both the enormous potential of Greece's urban stock and the structural barriers that continue to slow down its utilization.

The Greek market today possesses the expertise, investor interest, and operational maturity required to support much larger-scale urban regeneration projects. International interest toward multifamily housing, serviced living, student accommodation, and modern urban hospitality concepts continues to grow.

However, through our ongoing discussions with institutional investors and international capital partners, a clear level of hesitation toward the Greek urban development market remains evident.

Institutional capital does not fear complexity. It fears unpredictability.

This hesitation is rarely driven by lack of interest or capital availability. It stems primarily from the difficulty of understanding and forecasting a framework often characterized by complexity, delays, conflicting interpretations, and institutional inconsistency.

In many cases, local investment and development teams effectively find themselves translating realities that are difficult for international investors operating in more mature and predictable markets to fully comprehend.

In Greece, development teams are often required not only to execute projects, but to interpret the system itself.

Ultimately, what often makes the difference is not only the asset, but the quality, resilience, and operational capability of the teams managing investments within such a complex environment.

Cities Compete on Speed

Beyond housing and urban regeneration, the reactivation of existing building stock is also a matter of national economic competitiveness.

Modern cities increasingly compete not only on taxation or labor costs, but on permitting speed, infrastructure quality, operational efficiency, and their ability to absorb investment capital.

The future competitiveness of cities will increasingly depend on how quickly they can absorb and reactivate inactive urban assets.

The cities that will attract long-term institutional capital over the next decade will not necessarily be the ones that build the most, but the ones capable of adapting, densifying, and modernizing their existing urban fabric with speed, clarity, and institutional consistency.

Today, Greece possesses a rare opportunity. It has the building stock, the demand, the investor interest, and increasingly the technical expertise required to support meaningful urban transformation.

The question is no longer whether the market wants to invest in Greek cities. The question is whether the institutional and urban planning framework can evolve at the speed required by modern urban reality.

The next chapter of Greek cities will not be defined by how much we build, but by how intelligently we transform what already exists.