About 12% of the total housing stock in Greece, or some 800,000 properties across the country, remain empty and a number of them could under certain conditions be activated in the battle against the housing crisis.
These are properties that are not holiday homes, so there is a possibility for them to enter the residential supply with the right moves, according to Mando Zisopoulou, housing policy director at the Social Cohesion and Family Ministry.
Speaking on Sunday at the Real Estate Forum in Athens, Zisopoulou said the statistic is from a study on national housing policy, whose findings will be published in the coming days.
“The problem we observe from the data is that, unfortunately, most of the empty houses are not in areas suffering from big pressure. On the contrary, they are, [for example] in the southeastern Aegean and the Ionian islands, while the number of empty houses in major cities is smaller,” said the ministry official.
Another issue concerns the conditions of those properties: “Some 22% of them were built before the 1960s and another third of them between 1960 and 1980. In total, 80% are at least 25 years old, constructed before 2000,” Zisopoulou said, which entails the necessity for considerable funds toward renovating this stock before utilization.
