“Ilan, relax. It will be extended. It's always extended.”
Amit said it with a smile, in the lobby of a hotel in Athens, a freddo coffee in his hand. He didn't say it to convince me. He truly believed it. And to his credit, up to that day, history had been entirely on his side.
The document open between us on the table was a business plan for a building from the seventies in Pangrati. Five floors, ten apartments, a facade needing renovation and infrastructure needing replacement. Amit had bought buildings like this twice before, renovated them and sold the apartments one by one, most of them to Israelis. He knows the neighborhood, the contractors and the bureaucracy. He builds his numbers himself, in Excel, and those numbers he doesn't miss.
His Gantt chart looked like this: purchase now, planning and permits by mid-2027, works until the end of 2028, and sale of the apartments throughout 2029.
The problem was in the engineer's document. The building had old unauthorized construction. A penthouse that had been extended beyond the permit lines, and two balconies that had been enclosed back in the eighties. All before 2011, all eligible for the regularization track in Greece. That is: there is a solution, it costs money, and it can be priced.
Only that track is open until a certain date. And according to Amit's schedule, he planned to do the regularization “toward the sales.” That is, in 2029.
This is where the history Amit relied on comes in. The regularization track under Law 4495 of 2017 has been extended again and again. In January this year the Greek government added another two years, and the deadline for violations in the “concession” categories moved from 31 March 2026 to 31 March 2028. In June a new planning and building code came into force, which consolidated all the old legislation into one book.
“You see?” said Amit. “Another extension. A new code, too. They won't close it. Half of Greece would be stuck.”
And the truth is that his argument wasn't foolish. In Greece there is an enormous number of properties with violations of one kind or another. Enclosed balconies, attics turned into rooms, storage rooms turned into apartments. Any government that truly closed the track would have to explain to a very large public why their home can't be sold. That is exactly the logic that led to the previous extensions, and I have no reason to assume it has disappeared.
But political logic is not a clause in a law. And a business plan that rests on political logic is a gamble, even when the odds are good.
So I sat with him over what I see, and not over what I hope.
I see a new code that came into force in June and opened no new regularization track. The same categories, the same dates, only different article numbers. Whoever hoped the code would bring a big “amnesty” did not get one. I see the most serious category closed for years now, and nobody has reopened it. And I see a provision in the code stating in explicit words that a transaction in a property with an unregularized violation is entirely void.
Think about what that means for Amit's building. The working assumption has to be that in each of the ten sales there will be a buyer, an engineer on his behalf and a notary, and all of them will want to see that the apartment matches the permit. If the penthouse isn't regularized by March 2028, and if no further extension arrives, it won't be possible to sell it at all. And a building in which one apartment is stuck is not a building with nine good apartments. It is a building with a problem.
“So what, you're saying they won't extend?” asked Amit.
“I don't know if they'll extend,” I answered. “Neither do you. The difference between us is that you built the whole business plan on the answer.”
That didn't convince him right away. A developer who has done something twice successfully doesn't change his method because of one conversation in a lobby. But he came back to me a week later with a new schedule. The regularization went to the top of the list, before the permits and before the contractor. His engineer will file the case before renovation even begins. It cost him money early, in a year when he would have preferred to keep the money with him, and it took him a few months in timing.
And maybe Greece really will extend again. Maybe in 2028 Amit will look back and say he rushed for nothing. That is a real possibility, and I don't intend to pretend it isn't.
But the difference between the two scenarios isn't symmetrical. If they extend, Amit paid a little earlier. If they don't, the penthouse would have remained unlawful forever.
And there is another side that Amit hadn't thought of at the start: his buyers. An Israeli who buys an apartment from an Israeli developer in Athens trusts him exactly as Amit trusted the extension. If in 2029 the penthouse gets stuck, it won't remain Amit's technical problem with the municipality. It will be a buyer who transferred money and cannot get registered, and a developer whose name is tied to it. In a market where everybody knows everybody, that is the truly expensive price.
The question I would ask in your place
- Which deadline in local law does my business plan rest on, and how long before it do I plan to be ready?
- If the next extension doesn't come, which units in my project will get stuck, and what does that do to the cash flow?
- Am I pricing the law as it is today, or as I hope it will be?
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית