Greece Opens a Second Golden Visa Route Built Around Rental Portfolios

Greece has published a National Housing Policy Strategy that would open a second route into the Golden Visa, one built around rental portfolios rather than a single trophy asset. The strategy landed in the Government Gazette as FEK B' 5200/17.08.2026 and the detail reached the wider market over the past week.

What the new category would do

Under the current rules a Golden Visa applicant buys one property. The strategy proposes allowing an investor to assemble a portfolio of more than one property instead, on a hard condition: every unit in that portfolio must be placed into long-term rental. Short-term platform letting is explicitly prohibited, and the strategy document attaches a monitoring mechanism to enforce it.

The logic is straightforward. Greece wants residency capital pointed at long-term housing supply rather than at the short-let market that has absorbed so much of the country's urban stock. The new category is the carrot; the Airbnb prohibition is the condition attached to it.

The thresholds do not change

The existing investment tiers stay as they are. EUR 800,000 applies in Attica, the Thessaloniki prefecture, Mykonos, Santorini and islands with populations above 3,100. EUR 400,000 applies everywhere else. The standing restriction that a standard Golden Visa property must be a single unit above 120 square metres also remains.

What is not yet fixed is the part that determines whether the portfolio route is usable at all: how many apartments a portfolio may contain, whether geographic limits apply to it, and what the compliance procedure looks like in practice. None of that is established. An investor cannot structure to this today, because the parameters that would govern the structure do not exist yet.

The wider package

The portfolio Golden Visa is one of 50 measures in the strategy, of which 36 are already operating and 14 are new proposals. The programmes already running sit on more than EUR 6.5 billion. The confirmed figures are worth knowing because they show the scale of the domestic side of the problem:

- My Home II: EUR 2 billion, 15,188 approvals, maximum loan EUR 190,000

- Rent reimbursement: up to EUR 800 a year, 877,267 beneficiaries, EUR 201.6 million budget

- Housing allowance: EUR 70 to EUR 210 a month, 425,060 beneficiaries, EUR 300 million 2026 budget

- Student housing allowance: raised to EUR 1,500, or EUR 2,000 with roommates, and EUR 2,000 to EUR 2,500 outside Athens and Thessaloniki

Two further proposals matter for anyone building in Greece. A reduced VAT rate for social and affordable housing construction is proposed under EU Directive 2022/542, with Portugal at 6% and France at 10% cited as reference points, though no Greek rate has been set. A new Unified Housing Policy Body would act as a central coordination mechanism, funded at EUR 3 million from ESPA 2021-2027, filling the institutional gap left when the Workers' Housing Organization was abolished in 2012.

What this means for a foreign buyer

Nothing binds yet. Most of the 14 new measures require separate primary legislation and an identified funding source before they take effect, and the strategy itself says so. Treat this as a published direction of travel rather than a rule you can act on this quarter.

The direction is still informative. Greece is signalling that residency-linked investment will increasingly be conditioned on what the property is used for, not just what it cost. A buyer whose plan depends on short-term letting income should read the portfolio category as a warning rather than an opportunity: the state is building the monitoring apparatus to check use, and it is doing so in the same document that dangles the incentive. Anyone weighing a Greek purchase against a 2027 or 2028 horizon should assume use restrictions tighten rather than loosen.

The practical next marker is a bill text. Until one appears in the autumn parliamentary session, the permissible unit count and the geographic scope of the portfolio route remain unknown, and every figure circulating about them is speculation.

Background on the tiers as they currently stand: Greece Golden Visa Thresholds in 2026. On the letting rules the new category would harden: Greece's 2026 Short-Term Rental Rules.