Building a Holiday Home in Greece – Financing and Building Plots

For many people, wishing to live the dream and spend long summers in Greece, renovation and self-building are excellent ways of making your money go further. Unless you are prepared to live in rural areas, some distance away from the sea, buying property can be expensive. For those with less money to spend, building a holiday home in Greece is a great way of stretching out the budget to own the vacation home of your dreams, without having to compromise on location or size.

Building a Holiday Home in Greece: Finding the Funds

The first thing to consider with a self-build or renovation project is the source of financing, bearing in mind that you generally want to draw the money gradually, rather than receive a lump-sum. Certainly, most Greek contractors are much happier with staged payments, but there is one problem with this approach, the banks. Greek mortgage lenders are very reluctant to release money in stages and prefer to wait until the house is complete and ‘signed off’ before handing over the funds, mainly due to some of the unique hold-ups and bureaucracy that can affect any project. Unless you have access to money from another source, you are best off trying to organize a mortgage in your home country.

Building a Holiday Home in Greece: Urban vs Rural Building Plots

Finding the right sized plot is the most important part of the process and the one where most people fall down. Rules are usually very lenient in urban areas but finding the right sized plot for rural building can be a difficult and tortuous task. The easiest place to build is in designated urban areas, within the confines of a village or town, because the local town hall sets the planning restrictions. They will have bylaws governing the minimum size for the plot and the maximum percentage of that which can be taken up by building. As an example, a town hall might set a 1000m² minimum with 25% Area Occupancy (also known as footprint), and a Total Construction factor of 0.33. This means that the maximum size for the ground floor is 250m² and the maximum size of the entire construction is 330m².

Buying rural land is a much more complicated process and definitely requires the help of a good lawyer and an architect. Across most of Greece, a minimum plot size of 10 000m² is required, often rising to 20 000m², although plots with road frontage can have lower requirements. However, this is not the entire story, because you need to ensure that the land is zoned correctly. Protected land is a definite no-no and is protected for environmental or archaeological reasons. Restricted land can often be built upon but you need to seek planning permission, which can be a long, drawn out and expensive process. The final type is building land and, whilst it will cost more per m2, buying this type ensures that receiving permission to build is a formality.

Building a Holiday Home in Greece

Building a Holiday Home in Greece: The Third Way

Therefore, it seems that building a rural property requires a huge plot of land and all of the maintenance that comes with it. 10000m² is a very large area and will require agricultural machinery or a herd of goats to keep clean! To avoid this, one workaround is to buy a plot that has an existing building upon it, even if it is a ruin. As long as there is a footprint for a residence marked upon the plan, you can build a house there with a minimum of fuss and paperwork. Often, these buildings take up much more than the usual 2%/4% maximum, so it can be an extremely attractive proposition. However, double check that the existing building is marked as residential because planning permission will not always be granted for an agricultural or storage building to be converted.

Hopefully, this will have helped you to find the perfect building plot for building a holiday home in Greece. As always, this is only a very general guide and you must make sure that you find a reputable lawyer, architect and accountant before starting as the land laws are so variable across the country. In addition, buying land is no different from buying fixed property, so follow our guide to buying property in Greece before handing over any money.

Next week, we will look at the process of designing and building a holiday home in Greece.