---
title: "In Exarchia, the Airbnb Keypads Get Red Paint and Non-EU Buyers May Get a 15% Tax"
description: "Athens’s radical-left district maps Israeli-backed rentals as Greece freezes licences and plans a fivefold transfer tax on non-EU buyers"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-19T06:51:10Z
modified: 2026-10-19T16:55:47Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/in-exarchia-the-airbnb-keypads-get-red-paint-and-non-eu-buye-bb4078
language: en
tags: ["housing", "israel", "greece", "gentrification", "tourism", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# In Exarchia, the Airbnb Keypads Get Red Paint and Non-EU Buyers May Get a 15% Tax

*Athens’s radical-left district maps Israeli-backed rentals as Greece freezes licences and plans a fivefold transfer tax on non-EU buyers*

By Nate Ledger · October 19, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-exarchia-the-airbnb-keypads-get-red-paint-and-non-eu-buye-bb4078

## In brief

- Residents of Exarchia, Athens, are mapping foreign property purchases and say Israeli money is behind most new short-term rentals
- Non-residents invested a record €2.75bn in Greek real estate in 2024, according to the Bank of Greece
- Long-time residents describe evictions, emptied blocks, closed shops and the loss of nearly all squats housing refugees
- PM Mitsotakis plans to raise the transfer tax for non-EU buyers from 3% to 15%; the measure is not yet law
- Central Athens has frozen new short-term rental licences until the end of 2027, but residents say the damage is done

Exarchia is the Athens neighbourhood that has spent fifty years being the place where Greek protest happens. Lately it has also become a place where a lot of people buy flats and rent them out to tourists. Those two facts sit together uncomfortably. The district’s flavour is radical-left politics, Palestinian flags and solidarity slogans on every wall, and a local group says much of the money buying it up is Israeli.

[As Nils Adler reports for Al Jazeera](https://aljazeera.com/features/2026/10/19/in-pro-palestine-hub-of-athens-israeli-buyers-increase-local-resentment), Tonia Katerini, a 69-year-old architect who has lived in her flat since 1986, has spent months with her neighbours digitally mapping foreign purchases from public records. Each one gets a red dot. Zoom out from her street and the map is mostly red. By the group’s count, Israeli money is behind more than half of the area’s new company-run hotels and rentals. Israeli investors have bought two buildings on her own street, she said, and a company of that kind owns the flat below hers.

You can usually tell which buildings these are. Where the residents’ names would go, the buzzer panel has numbers, and a keypad by the door lets Airbnb guests get their keys. Activists have been throwing red paint at the keypads and facades. One building is streaked with black paint and two slogans: “Airbnbs leave us homeless” and “Zionists not welcome.”

The economics behind this are simple, and that is most of the problem. Imagine you own a two-bedroom flat near central Athens. Rent it to a family on a long lease and you get one monthly rent, plus whatever tenant protections apply, plus a family. Rent it to tourists by the night and, in a good location, you can earn a lot more, and the guests leave after a weekend. Do that for a whole building and the flats have stopped being housing. You are running a hotel, just one without the zoning a hotel would need. Every investor can do this sum, and the people who live there pay the difference.

![A cream apartment building shaped like a wheeled suitcase has balconies with plants, a telescoping handle, and red paint splattered beside its entrance intercom.](https://rews.cc/img/2fc405e4507954eb7eed8cc61b2761861a2a1b3a.webp)

The money is real, and plenty of it. According to the Bank of Greece, non-residents put a record 2.75 billion euros ($3.2bn) into Greek real estate in 2024, and the figure eased last year. No official data breaks down Athens buyers by nationality. But the Greek weekly To Vima reported that an annual survey of completed sales by the agency network RE/MAX Hellas found Israelis were the largest group of foreign buyers in Attica, the region around the capital, ahead of buyers from Turkiye and Lebanon.

None of this would matter politically in most neighbourhoods. Exarchia has a history. In 1973, students at the nearby Athens Polytechnic rose up against the US-backed junta, which fell the following year. In 2008, police shot dead Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, in Exarchia, and protests spread across the country. Katerini says the anger caught like “fire on dry land”, and during the debt crisis it helped carry Syriza to power in 2015.

Chrysoulla Papageorgiou, a 46-year-old schoolteacher who has lived there for 24 years, says the change was slow and then fast. At first small owners rented out a spare room. After the pandemic, companies started buying entire blocks. “Overnight, tenants were displaced and apartment blocks emptied,” she said. Bars put their tables out on streets that used to be quiet. Rents went up, and the first to leave were migrants and low-income families, many of them in basements and on lower floors. Schools lost pupils. Bookshops, traditional cafes and grocers closed. The occupied buildings where residents had sheltered refugees were on prime land, so police cleared them early and they were sold. “Half were squats,” she said. “Now we have only one.”

![A large cream service bell shelters small tables, red chairs, a desk, and stacked books against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/3a06c8621dbf1fe0fc43f43dfe30bdaf3587916e.webp)

Exarchia Square, which used to be where protests started, has been a fenced construction site for a new metro station since 2022, and Papageorgiou says riot police are now there every day. She thinks the aim is to make central Athens “purely touristic”, and says that in recent years the buyers have been “almost only Israeli”. Katerini thinks foreign buyers see Greece as a safer home for their money than Israel, and points out that in Athens “the government is very friendly with Israel”. In August, Greece signed a $3.5bn missile deal with Israel.

Vagelis Lazaridis, who heads a branch of the Athens-Attica Real Estate Agents’ Association, describes it in plainer commercial terms. Exarchia “was a run-down area”, which made it “a very good opportunity”. It sits next to the centre, close to the metro and to universities full of foreign students, and unlike Plaka under the Acropolis it has few building restrictions. Once a few buyers come, he said, others follow. That is a fair description of how gentrification works anywhere. It is also exactly what the residents are complaining about.

## The tax

The government now wants the market to slow down. Speaking at the Thessaloniki International Fair on 6 September, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis [announced a rise in the property transfer tax](https://www.imidaily.com/europe/greece-to-quintuple-property-transfer-tax-to-15-for-non-eu-buyers-from-january-2027/) for buyers from outside the EU, from 3 percent to 15 percent. Early reports gave 1 January 2027 as the start date. Al Jazeera reports it as next July. On a 250,000-euro flat, the tax would go from 7,500 euros to 37,500 euros. “The party is over in Greece,” *The Jerusalem Post* wrote, adding that the country “is about to become far less appealing” to Israelis.

There are two catches. The plan is not yet law, agents’ associations oppose it, and Lazaridis says it “may not take effect, or may be postponed”. And the Greek site in.gr reported that agents expect some non-EU buyers to hurry their purchases through before the deadline. If you announce a fivefold tax months before it applies, the first thing it does is create a closing-down sale.

![Three yellow apartment buildings with running legs move beneath a giant cream key attached to a black upright lock against a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/5e6c3ba8ca7e10ca1efa7bd48acfde53edf5e659.webp)

Iryna Rondyak, a Ukrainian-born agent with an agency near Exarchia, thinks the tide has already turned. She says that when Israeli buyers started arriving about a decade ago they were around 60 percent of her foreign clients, and many bought whole office buildings to turn into hotels. Until about 2024, foreigners made up roughly 70 percent of her sales. This year it is around 30 percent, as young Greeks come back with state-backed mortgages under the “Spiti mou” (My Home) scheme.

She gives the rules the credit. Central Athens, Exarchia included, has issued no new short-term rental licences, and To Vima reported that in September the freeze was extended to the end of 2027. Athens News reported this month that the number of [active short-term rental registrations in central Athens](https://en.rua.gr/2026/10/08/authorities-are-clamping-down-on-airbnb-there-are-1500-fewer-properties-in-the-center-of-athens/) fell in a year from more than 14,000 to fewer than 12,500. Properties bought through the “golden visa” can now only be let long-term. A cheaper 250,000-euro ($280,000) route into the visa rewards investors who turn empty offices into flats. “Anyone living in Greece couldn’t find a home in the centre. Everything was on Airbnb,” Rondyak said. “Now there are far fewer.” It is “a little better”, she said, but “the problem still exists”: rents are still 10 to 15 euros ($12 to $17) per square metre even in the southern suburbs, and many flats sit empty because the tax bill makes renting them not worth it.

Residents are not persuaded. The freeze is temporary, they say, people with enough money can still find a way in, and nothing in it turns the buildings that are already short-term rentals back into homes.

Papageorgiou considers herself lucky. Her landlady’s family has lived in the area for generations, and the landlady refuses to raise the rent as an “act of resistance”. Papageorgiou joked that the landlady’s accountant has told her she is ruining the market. In a sense the accountant is right: the market here is the gap between what a neighbour pays and what a tourist pays, and she is choosing not to collect it.