Greece raising Golden Visa limit to €500,000 on May 1

In a move aimed at keeping neighborhoods from being turned into short-term rental tourist havens, Greece in May will double the investment threshold for rich foreigners to get a Golden Visa to 500,000 euros ($542,160.)

The standard of investing in real estate had been 250,000 euros ($271,108) but was so low for people with means, especially the Chinese, that they were scooping up multiple properties going up for rent to tourists.

That pushed long-term residents out in the capital and the country’s second-largest city Thessaloniki as well as other popular areas and drove up rents, with the visa coming with a 5-year renewable residency permit and European Union passport.

The new level will apply to the two biggest cities as well the insanely-popular islands of Santorini and Mykonos in what Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said was to hold down rents for long-term residents, noted SchengenVisaInfo.com

https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/greece-to-double-its-minimum-amount-of-investment-for-golden-visas-from-may-1/

While other EU countries are abandoning Golden Visas because they’re open to money laundering and criminal activity, Greece has gone all-out to get rich foreigners at the same time that even those in the Diaspora have to wait for two years or more to get citizenship.

There has been a rush to get the visas before the coming change with record-breaking levels in the last quarter of 2022 as the COVID-19 pandemic waned and people could freely travel, the site noted.

From October-December then there were 2,432 applications for Golden Visas were submitted after interest had already been building before that, with 16,411 filed from 2018-22, the report added, some 4,485 in 2022 alone.

That was an increase of 125 percent from 2021 when travel was still limited under lockdowns and slowdowns with the interest also coming from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and also Russia before EU sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine blocked Russian airlines from the bloc, limiting Russians.

Read more at thenationalherald.com

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