Buying in a Greek border area: the clearance UK buyers now need

A restriction older than Brexit

Greece designates a set of regions and islands as border areas, and in those places a buyer who is not an EU national needs prior approval before acquiring rights over land or property. The framework comes from Greek legislation of 1990 and has been amended more than once since. It was written with national security in mind, not with foreign buyers of holiday homes in mind, and for thirty years it simply did not touch British purchasers.

That changed on 1 January 2021. The rule has never mentioned the United Kingdom, and nothing about it was rewritten for Brexit. British citizens moved into the category the rule already applied to, and inherited a step that Belgian, German and Irish buyers still do not have to take.

It is worth being precise about what the step is. In the ordinary case it is a permission process with a decision at the end of it, not a refusal dressed up as a process. Applications from private buyers purchasing a home are routinely approved. The cost of the rule is almost always time and paperwork rather than the purchase itself.

Where the rule actually bites

The designated areas sit along Greece's land frontiers in the north and north east, across the Dodecanese, and on several of the eastern Aegean islands close to the Turkish coast. Parts of Crete and some other regions have also appeared in the designations over the years.

That is deliberately a description rather than a list, because the list is a legal one that has been amended and is not something to take from an article. Two properties a few kilometres apart can fall on opposite sides of a boundary, and a village that a forum post describes as clear may sit inside a designated municipality after a boundary revision. The only reliable answer comes from a Greek lawyer checking the specific parcel against the current designation.

The practical consequence is that this is a question to ask at the shortlist stage, not after an offer. If you are drawn to Rhodes, Kos, Samos, Lesvos, Chios or the north eastern mainland, assume the question applies until a lawyer tells you otherwise.

What the approval process involves

The application goes to a committee within the relevant decentralised administration, the regional arm of central government for the area in which the property sits. It is made in the buyer's name, usually by a Greek lawyer acting under a power of attorney, and it sets out who you are, what you intend to acquire and what you intend to use it for.

Expect to supply identity documents, evidence of your background and standing, a description of the property with its cadastral details, and a statement of intended use. Documents originating in the United Kingdom will generally need official translation into Greek, and often an apostille as well.

Timescales vary by committee and by season, and nobody should quote you a fixed number of weeks. Treat it as a variable measured in months rather than days, and build the plan around that uncertainty instead of around a best case.

Why it sits on the mortgage's critical path

A Greek lender is not going to release funds into a transaction that cannot lawfully complete. If clearance is outstanding, the mortgage offer waits, and mortgage offers have expiry dates. On a purchase where the approval takes longer than expected, the risk is not usually that the loan is refused; it is that the offer lapses and the file has to be revalidated, with fresh payslips, fresh statements and sometimes a fresh valuation.

This lands on top of the other items that already gate a non-resident purchase. You need a Greek tax number, the AFM, and in most cases a Greek bank account, both of which take their own time to arrange from abroad. Running the border area check in parallel with those, at the very start, costs nothing. Running it at the end can cost the whole timetable.

There is a related point on the property itself. Because the check is parcel specific, it is one of several reasons the legal search should be finished before you commit money, alongside the title history, the planning position and whether anything on the plot was built without permission.

Protecting the deposit in the preliminary contract

Greek purchases commonly run through a preliminary agreement with a deposit, and in Greek practice a buyer who walks away can forfeit it. That is exactly the wrong structure to sign into while an approval you do not control is still pending.

The answer is not to avoid the preliminary agreement but to have your lawyer draft it so that the outcome of the committee application, and the mortgage offer, are conditions rather than assumptions. What happens to the deposit if approval is refused, and what happens if it is simply slow, are two different questions and both belong in the document.

Sellers and agents are used to this. It is a normal request from a non-EU buyer, and the time to make it is before signature, when it is a drafting point rather than a renegotiation.

What the rule does not do

It does not restrict what you may own once approval is granted. Ownership rights over the property are the same as any other owner's.

It does not change your borrowing terms. The loan-to-value ceiling and the maximum term that Greek lenders apply to third-country applicants are a separate matter, driven by where you are resident rather than by where the property is, and they apply just as much to a purchase in an undesignated area.

And it does not give you any right to spend more time in the country. Ownership and immigration status are unconnected. If you intend to be in Greece for more than the standard visitor allowance, that is a question for an immigration adviser, and it is better answered before the purchase than after it.

Questions UK buyers ask

Continue your research

• Brexit and Greek mortgages: what actually changed
• Using UK home equity to buy in Greece
• Start a personal Greek mortgage scan