In Athens' Exarchia, Israeli Real Estate Buying Wave Stirs Anger in a Leftist Bastion

Athens, Greece – Tonia Katerini, a 69-year-old architect, sits at her computer scrolling through property records that she says are transforming her neighborhood. Across Exarchia – the central Athens district long known for its radical left-wing politics – apartments are being bought up and converted into short-term rentals, pushing out the people who live there.

For months, Katerini and a group of neighbors have mapped foreign purchases using public records, marking them with red dots. When she zooms out from her own street, a whole red zone emerges.

The balcony doors of the apartment where she has lived since 1986 stand open, and noise from the cafes below drifts in past potted plants and stacks of architectural drawings. Her group believes much of the money behind these rental businesses is Israeli; by their count, more than half of the new, company-operated hotels and rentals in the area belong to these investors.

In a neighborhood where Palestinian flags hang from balconies and solidarity slogans cover the walls, that has created tension.

On her own cobbled street, where the wheels of tourists' suitcases wake her each morning, Israeli investors have bought two buildings, she says. The apartment directly below hers belongs to such a company. "They are decent people downstairs," she says. "It's an Israeli company."

A few streets away, a residential building has been painted black with slogans: "Airbnb makes us homeless" and "Zionists not welcome." Such buildings are easy to spot: instead of residents' names, the buzzer plates show only numbers, with a keypad by the door for Airbnb guests to collect keys. Across the neighborhood, activists have sprayed red paint over keypads and facades.

They say short-term rentals are fueling aggressive gentrification, pushing locals out of the area and blurring its identity.

Foreign money has poured into Greek real estate in recent years: non-residents invested a record 2.75 billion euros ($3.2 billion) in Greek property in 2024, according to the Bank of Greece, before the pace cooled last year. There are no official figures breaking down foreign buyers in Athens by nationality. However, an annual survey of completed transactions by the RE/MAX Hellas agency network found that Israelis were the largest group of foreign buyers in Attica – the region surrounding the capital – ahead of buyers from Turkey and Lebanon, according to the Greek weekly To Vima.

Exarchia's tradition of political activism runs deep. In 1973, students at the nearby Athens Polytechnic rose up against the US-backed military junta, which collapsed the following year. In 2008, police shot dead Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, in Exarchia, sparking protests across the country. Katerini likens the episode to "fire on dry land." As Greece's debt crisis deepened, anger on the streets helped bring the left-wing Syriza party to power in 2015.

'Tenants pushed out, apartment blocks left empty'

Chrysoulla Papageorgiou, a teacher who has lived in Exarchia for 24 years, is a familiar face on its streets. The 46-year-old remembers the area as "a neighborhood of solidarity."

The change came slowly, then accelerated. At first, small owners rented out spare rooms. After the COVID-19 pandemic, companies began buying entire blocks. "Overnight, tenants were pushed out and the apartment blocks were left empty," she says.

Bars proliferated, their tables and chairs spilling onto pavements on once-quiet streets. Rents rose, and immigrants and low-income families – many living in basements and lower floors – were the first to leave. Schools lost pupils, and secondhand bookshops, traditional cafes and grocery stores closed.

For years, Exarchia residents sheltered refugees in squatted buildings. Sitting on prime land, these were the first buildings to be cleared by police and later sold, according to Papageorgiou. "Half were squats," she says. "Now we have only one left." That last building is draped in painted banners declaring solidarity with the families inside; neighbors help make sure the children get to school.

Since 2022, Exarchia Square – long the heart of the neighborhood's protests – has been fenced off as a construction site for a new metro station that many residents oppose. Riot police, Papageorgiou adds, are now a daily presence. The goal, she says, is to turn central Athens into a place that is "purely touristic."

In recent years, buyers have been "almost exclusively Israeli." A large Palestinian flag hangs near the square. Tourists sometimes scrawl anti-Palestinian messages on its white band, and activists paint it white again. According to Katerini, foreign investors see Greece as a safer place for their money than Israel itself, and in Athens "the government is very friendly toward Israel." In August, Athens signed a $3.5 billion missile deal with Israel.

'A very good opportunity' for investors

Vagelis Lazaridis, a burly real estate agent who heads a branch of the Athens-Attica Real Estate Brokers Association, speaks about his trade with enthusiasm. He says the reasons for the investments are purely practical.

Exarchia "used to be a run-down area," which made it "a very good opportunity," he says. The district sits next to the center, near the metro and close to universities with large numbers of foreign students. Unlike Plaka at the foot of the Acropolis, it has few building restrictions. When a few buyers show up, others follow, he says.

Greece to be 'far less attractive' to Israeli buyers

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 will rise from 3% to 15% from July.

"The party is over in Greece," The Jerusalem Post wrote in a recent article. "The country, which in recent years became a favored destination for Israelis seeking real estate investments at reasonable prices and attractive yields, is about to become far less attractive."

Lazaridis says brokers' associations oppose the plan, which has not yet become law. It "may not take effect, or it may be delayed," he says. Brokers expect some non-EU buyers to speed up purchases before the deadline, according to the Greek news site in.gr.

'Fewer Airbnbs'

Not everyone in the industry sees an irreversible trend. Iryna Rondyak, who is originally from Ukraine, runs her own real estate agency near Exarchia. She says that when Israeli buyers began arriving about a decade ago, they made up around 60% of her foreign clients, many buying entire office buildings to convert into hotels. Until about 2024, foreigners accounted for around 70% of her sales, she says. This year the figure is around 30%, as state-backed mortgages for young Greeks under the "Spiti mou" (My Home) program bring local buyers back.

She credits new regulations for the shift. No new short-term rental licenses are being granted in central Athens, including Exarchia, and in September the freeze was extended to the end of 2027, according to To Vima. Properties bought under Greece's "golden visa" residency program can now only be rented long-term, while a cheaper route into the program, at 250,000 euros ($280,000), favors investors who convert empty office buildings into apartments.

"Anyone living in Greece cannot find a home in the center. Everything is on Airbnb," she says. "Now there is much less." Things are "a little better," she says, but "the problem is still there." Rents remain high, at 10 to 15 euros ($12 to $17) per square meter, even in the southern suburbs, she says. Many apartments stand empty because landlords find renting not worth the tax bill.

Residents are less convinced. The rental freeze is only temporary, they say, and investors with enough money can still find ways in. Nor can it undo what has already happened: many buildings in the neighborhood are now short-term rentals.

Back in Exarchia, 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 her landlady's accountant told her she is wrecking the market.