A Bank of Greece working paper published in March 2026, examining 109,407 residential transactions from 2017 to 2024, offers the clearest evidence yet of how Greece’s Golden Visa investment thresholds reshape where — and at what price — buyers actually purchase property.
Greece introduced its real-estate Golden Visa route in 2013 with a minimum investment of €250,000. Law 5007/2022 later raised that minimum to €500,000 in selected high-demand locations, including parts of Athens, the municipality of Thessaloniki, Mykonos and Santorini, while other areas kept the original €250,000 minimum. Because Greece’s property register does not record a buyer’s nationality or whether a purchase was made specifically to qualify for the Golden Visa, the researchers could not tag individual transactions as investor purchases directly — instead, they looked at how transaction prices clustered around the legal minimum needed to qualify, both before and after the 2022 reform.
The pattern is striking. Before the reform, transactions clustered heavily around the €250,000 mark nationwide — Ministry of Migration and Asylum data cited in the paper showed about 58% of recorded Golden Visa property applications concentrated near that figure. After the threshold rose to €500,000 in higher-demand areas, that clustering around €250,000 weakened there — but grew more pronounced in areas that kept the lower threshold, including nearby municipalities within Attica. The researchers’ reading: rather than disappearing, Golden Visa-driven demand appears to have moved to wherever the €250,000 minimum still applied.
For buyers evaluating the property-versus-deposit choice under Greece’s Golden Visa today, this adds a concrete, data-backed reason to look closely at where a property sits relative to the €500,000/€250,000 boundary, not just at the headline minimum for the country as a whole — a property just outside a high-threshold zone can still qualify at the lower figure, and the paper’s evidence suggests plenty of buyers are already making that choice.
