Short-term rentals changing cityscape
Greater Athens getting too expensive for locals, who are shedding reluctance to share digs
Short-term rentals, mainly through online platforms such as Airbnb, are making living in Athens more expensive and rapidly changing the cityscape, mostly not for the better, as several local residents have told Kathimerini.
The spike in rents was first made apparent in central Athens and, lately, seems to be expanding across the whole metropolitan area. The average rent across Greater Athens stands currently at €8.95 per square meter, a level which, before the financial crisis that broke out late in the first decade of the century, could be found only in the tony central neighborhood of Kolonaki and the area around nearby Lycabettus Hill.
While rents in high-income neighborhoods and suburbs had always been beyond the reach of the average Athenian, or internal migrant, there were always more affordable neighborhoods near and far from the city center: Exarchia, Koukaki, Kypseli, Neos Kosmos and Pangrati were such examples.
No longer. According to a price list recently issued by real estate company RE/MAX Greece, rental prices in Neos Kosmos, a densely-built and not exactly attractive neighborhood southeast of central Athens, at €9.30 per square meter are higher than in the northern suburb of Ekali (€9 per sq.m.), where many of the country’s rich have their mansions.
Property owners, salivating at the prospect of a quick profit from short-term rentals, are raising their asking prices from tenants, essentially hoping to drive them away. Even in places such as the western suburb of Peristeri, formerly a working-class enclave, apartments as small as 45-50 square meters are rented for €450 monthly. Some owners also defer needed repairs so that exasperated tenants will leave.
The situation is making shared apartment living more common, a quiet revolution in a society where this arrangement is still more common among university students and where professionals living with a roommate are looked down upon as failures. Online platforms catering to the professional class are emerging, and some have started to expand abroad, where, they say, apartment sharing is more entrenched.
And, as a tenant told Kathimerini, some of the larger apartments, which are more difficult to convert to short-term rentals, can be a steal – provided there is a flatmate to share with.
