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A Bank of Greece study found that property transactions clustered differently after Greece changed its Golden Visa thresholds.
For years, the country’s Golden Visa programme allowed non-EU buyers to qualify through a property purchase of at least €250,000. Transactions began clustering around that figure. When Greece doubled the minimum in selected high-demand areas, the pattern changed.
A March 2026 Bank of Greece working paper (opens in a new tab) examined 109,407 residential transactions completed between 2017 and 2024. In places where the threshold rose to €500,000, the cluster around €250,000 weakened. It became more pronounced in places that kept the lower threshold.
The authors interpret the threshold as a price anchor, with transaction patterns consistent with changes in reported values and location choices.
The threshold became a price anchor
Greece introduced its real-estate Golden Visa route in 2013 with a €250,000 minimum. Law 5007/2022 later increased the minimum to €500,000 in selected high-demand locations, including parts of Athens, the municipality of Thessaloniki, Mykonos and Santorini. The researchers treat 2023 and 2024 as the period after that change.
The property register does not record a buyer’s nationality or whether a purchase was made for a Golden Visa. The researchers could not label individual transactions as investor purchases. Instead, they looked for changes around the exact price needed to qualify.
The researchers found pronounced clustering around €250,000. Before the reform, many transactions sat close to €250,000. Ministry of Migration and Asylum data cited by the researchers showed the same concentration in actual Golden Visa applications: about 58% of recorded property applications from 2017 to 2024 reported an investment between €250,000 and €260,000.
There are several reasons a market might settle around that number. A seller could raise a price slightly to make a property eligible for foreign buyers. Another seller might stay just below the threshold to appeal to local buyers. In both cases, the legal minimum becomes part of the pricing decision.
What changed after the minimum rose
Some municipalities moved to €500,000. Others stayed at €250,000, giving the researchers a natural comparison.
After the change, transactions stopped clustering as heavily around €250,000 in the higher-threshold areas. The cluster grew in lower-threshold markets. In Attica, the researchers also found more activity around €250,000 in nearby municipalities where that amount still qualified.
Some Golden Visa demand appears to have moved rather than disappeared. Buyers who no longer qualified in one municipality looked at another where the lower minimum remained available.
The data cannot follow an individual buyer from one municipality to another. Nor can it show that every €250,000 sale involved a Golden Visa applicant. The case rests on timing, location and the sharp concentration of transactions around the legal minimum. The paper therefore says the evidence is “consistent with” demand shifting across municipal borders.
What the Attica estimate means
In the authors’ preferred model, reported transaction values in affected municipalities were about 9.5% lower after the reform than the model suggests they would have been if the €250,000 threshold had remained in place.
That does not mean Athens property prices fell by 9.5%. Prices could rise in both the affected and comparison areas. The finding is narrower: values in the higher-threshold municipalities rose more slowly than they did in comparable municipalities that kept the lower threshold.
The authors put the estimate into euros. Using a pre-reform average transaction value of €117,892, they calculated a difference of roughly €11,200 per sale. Across about 6,315 transactions in the affected parts of Attica, that adds up to approximately €70.7 million less in reported buyer expenditure than the counterfactual estimate.
These are officially reported transaction values, which may differ from underlying market prices. The calculation is not a measure of the programme’s total economic cost or benefit. It does not include tax revenue, investor gains or longer-term effects.
The same result did not appear across Greece. Once fixed effects were included, the national estimate was not statistically significant. Neither were the estimates for Thessaloniki and the South Aegean. The strongest evidence came from Attica, where there were more transactions and more exposure to Golden Visa demand.
Today’s rules are different
The study looks at the earlier move from €250,000 to €500,000. It does not measure the full effect of the rules investors face today (opens in a new tab).
Since Sep 1, 2024, the standard property minimum has been €800,000 in Attica, the Thessaloniki regional unit, Mykonos, Santorini and Greek islands with more than 3,100 residents. The standard minimum is €400,000 elsewhere.
A €250,000 property route still exists, but only for qualifying commercial-to-residential conversions and listed-building restorations. It is not the general entry price for an ordinary residential purchase.
Standard €800,000 and €400,000 purchases must involve one property with at least 120 square metres of main space. The 120-square-metre minimum does not apply to either €250,000 route.
Because the study’s data end in 2024, it cannot show how the current three-tier system (opens in a new tab) has changed prices or buyer behaviour. Answering that question will require newer transaction data.
What the findings mean for buyers
Golden Visa eligibility does not establish that a property is fairly priced.
Buyers still need to check whether a property qualifies under the current rules and whether its price is reasonable compared with similar homes not marketed around residence eligibility.
Those questions can point in different directions. A qualifying property may be overpriced; a competitively priced one may fail because of its use, size, planning history or listed status.
That makes ordinary property due diligence (opens in a new tab) especially important near a visa threshold. Buyers should compare price per square metre, condition and local resale demand, then verify title, encumbrances, permitted use and any claimed change of use or listed status before committing funds.
The study suggests that a Golden Visa threshold can shape the property market around it. When one area becomes more expensive for programme eligibility, transaction activity may shift toward nearby places where a lower minimum still applies.
Sources and methodology
The analysis is based on Bank of Greece working paper 359, “Threshold-Based Policies and Distortions in Housing Markets,” by Dimitris Karamanis, Christos Kotsogiannis and Evangelia Papapetrou. The property register does not identify buyer nationality or Golden Visa purpose, so the paper describes the geographic result as evidence “consistent with” a shift in demand.
Current programme rules were checked against Law 5100/2024 and official Greek government guidance.