Roi called me the second time in a completely different voice from the first. “This time I want you to check everything before I transfer a single shekel,” he said. He didn't ask for an opinion. He asked for accompaniment from the first second.
I had known Roi for three years before that conversation. He is a technology manager in his forties, the kind who reads every email twice before sending it. When he first told me about the apartment he wanted to buy in Greece, it was Tilos, a small, non-touristy island, a few hundred permanent residents, no direct flights from Israel. A friend who knew a Greek real estate agent described it to him as “the next island in line.” The prices were low to a degree that seemed almost impossible relative to the sea and the view. The logic was simple: whoever gets in now, before everyone discovers the place, will see a double return, both from rent and from appreciation.
Roi bought a small vacation apartment, two bedrooms, a balcony with a sea view. He paid almost the entire amount up front, because the seller, a local family selling directly without an official broker, asked for it that way, and Roi didn't see it as a red flag. He didn't bring Israeli legal accompaniment. “It's a small deal,” he told me then, when he told me about it in hindsight. “I thought it was unnecessary.”
He renovated. Refurnished. In the first year everything seemed fine. He came for a vacation, enjoyed the apartment, even rented it out for two weeks to a family he knew. But when he tried to rent it out seriously - through vacation sites, through local agencies, it became clear to him that the island had not built the traffic that was promised. No direct flights. No tourism infrastructure that brings a steady flow. The agencies he called answered politely that the demand “isn't there yet.”
Two years passed. The apartment stood empty most of the time. When he decided to sell, he discovered that the only buyers who showed interest offered a much lower sum than what he had paid. Not because the apartment had changed. Because nobody wants to buy a property on an island with no rental demand. He finally sold at a loss of close to a quarter of a million shekels, the difference between what he paid and what he received, plus costs that never came back.
I think about this a lot, because it isn't the mistake of someone who didn't understand real estate. Roi understood real estate. His mistake was elsewhere: he bought a property on the basis of a bet on the market's future, not on the basis of what the market already proves now. “The next island in line” can stay that way for a decade. Nobody guarantees it will happen fast, and nobody guarantees it will happen at all.
What impressed me is what Roi did afterward. He didn't run from Greece. He came back, but in a completely different way. This time he chose an established area, with rental demand that can be checked in real data - average occupancy, actual rental prices, not an agent's promises. And this time he brought Israeli legal accompaniment from the first moment, even before signing a preliminary offer, not afterward.
“The first time I bought a dream,” he told me. “The second time I bought numbers.”
He didn't get rich from the second deal. But the apartment is rented most months of the year, and he sleeps soundly.
The question I would ask in your place
- Am I buying a property in a place that has rental demand today, or in a place that only has a promise that demand will arrive?
- What happens if I need to sell in two years - who is the potential buyer, and why would he want precisely this property?
- Did I bring legal accompaniment before I committed financially, or only after it was already too late to change terms?
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית