So You Want to Buy A Property on Crete? Part 1 - The Motivation

Around this time of year, autumn and winter, we frequently get out of season visitors, from other parts of Europe, arriving on Crete to look at property of various types. This is not really a 'gay' subject, although some of them are, of course, gay or lesbian, and these blogs are designed to give a few hints and tips based on my experience.


As with any step like this it is a good idea to police our motivations as to why you are thinking of buying property on Crete, or indeed anywhere abroad!


We can broadly split the motivation into four headings -


- As an investment

- A holiday or rental property and maybe later a place to live

- A house to live in full time as you are going to move here permanently

- A business to run for yourself



Investment property would have to be very long term as although prices have risen on Crete over the last five years, the increase in value is nothing like the swingeing increases seen in the UK in previous years, for instance. You also need to thinking about who you might be selling to in the future, bear in mind that the Greeks own most of Greece and the chances are you have just bought a property from a Greek who doesn't want it, so your future market is unikely to be anyone Greek and is more likely to be someone like yourself, a foreigner who is buying here for the same reasons you are.


Holiday properties come in all shapes and sizes, but bear in mind that many people who buy holiday properties feel duty bound to come and use it once or twice a year, however there are a number of agents around Crete who will let it for you, at a price, or you can construct your own web site and do your own promotions on sites such as Gumtree or Hot Frog. It is a good idea to make it multilingual if you can, or at least put the Google 'Translate' Gadget on the site, it makes it friendlier for everyone!

Holiday rentals can be quite lucrative as you will be catering to the 'independent' traveller, who doesn't want the package deal and will pay that little bit more for somewhere nice and unusual.

In the main, many holiday properties are not really suitable for 'full time' living, so you need to go for the full size 'villa' type property if you intend moving to Crete full time at a later date. Although I do know of someone who bought two adjacant properties in the same complex and when they came to move here, knocked a doorway through!

Moving to Crete on a permanent basis can be a rewarding and enjoyable experience if you do your homework properly. The island is large, and there are many things to do and see when you are not working, add to this the Greek lifestyle, food, entertainment, and the generally good weather, and you have a place to stay where you can enjoy life to the full, with all its good bits and some of its frustrations and stressful moments as well.

In there somewhere you have found a hint of other things other than the good!

Firstly, and this is purely your choice and depends on your personal circumstances, I mentioned work! A dirty word indeed.

However, in general, very few of the migrant population here on Crete, lead a life of idle pleasures, many arrive, and after settling in doing nothing suddenly realise that during the summer there is no one to talk to because everyone else is working. Not surprisingly there are also financial considerations here, you may have taken early retirement and have a good pension, but inflation takes its toll everywhere, and that index linking may not be as good in the future as you thought. Not everyone works in the tourist industry, tourism only accounts for 13% of the GNI, but it is a good place to start while you are learning to speak Greek, and you will won't you?

Working will also help you integrate into the local population (foreign as well as Greek!), and you came to LIVE on Crete didn't you?

Frustrations and stressful moments will also, without fail, appear and like anywhere else you will have to deal with them as they arise. Parking tickets, unpaid bills that you didn't receive, land disputes (more of these later!), illness, death, taxation, pregnancy, household repairs, plumbers, banks, and lawyers. All of these will become part of your daily life as they do anywhere else, very few people manage to sail through life without experiencing any of them!

You will need to commit whole-heartedly if you are going to live here, for every few hundred that move here, many move back, often for the strangest, and sometimes the most predictable of reasons. Take the mid-30's couple who went to all the trouble of building a house and furnishing it, and promptly put it up for sale without living in it because the wife became pregnant! Not an unlikely occurance is it? The reason for not having the baby here? Not really specified but I guess the committment was not there. After all we do have doctors and hospitals here, the University Hospital in Heraklion is one of the best in Europe and Greece. (We have people from Germany come here just to be ill!)

Others, myself included, have had to undergo the death of a partner, and although our English friends and relatives expected an instant return to 'home', we have not done so. Speaking for myself I cannot think of a nicer place to be bereaved.

You will hear often from certain sectors of the migrant population who live here 'part-time', how expensive it is here. Of course this is not true, with one of the lowest per capita incomes in Europe how can it be? But these are people who come for maybe one month or two at a time, and who should by now, know where the cheapest places to eat are, but still insist on using the most expensive restaurants that there are! From information I have to hand Spain has equivalent prices, and in France, ONE person can easily spend €100 on a meal out!

Businesses in Greece are always for sale or rent. Sounds like a sweeping statement but it is often true. Many businesses are being sold by foreigners, but often business premises are up for rent or sale from Greek sellers as well, especially after a not very good year.

On the whole I would advise against buying any business here, but then that applies most places for various reasons. The seller will tell you it is a 'very good business', if this is the case why are they selling it? You will find it virtually impossible to see a set of books for any business you are buying, there might be figures that are put it into the tax office, and there might be figures that the current owner has kept, but they will rarely agree.

I have a Greek friend who told me once that he had had three good businesses. Foolishly I asked what happened to them, and was told completely without embarrassment that they all went bankrupt!

If the existing owner is Greek, there is a fair chance that he or his family own the property, and therefore do not pay any rent, but you will have to. And with rents up to €1200 per month for twelve months of the year when you are only open for six of them can make life difficult. There are often occasions as well, when the premises are unlicensed, this is usually due to the fact that the building should not even be there in the first place.

The same applies to staff. All those people that work in that bar, or that cafe, are probably relations and are not on salaries, and probaly do not get their IKA (social security) paid either.

You will also come across the situation where you go to change the utility bills into you own name and find you cannot because none of them have been paid for the last year, or in the case of water bills for the last 14 years. Not paying bills is an excellent way of increasing profits.

But having said that, if you have a really good idea for something completely new and original by all means start up a business, you will probably get a good year first time round before three others places open up doing exactly the same thing within 500 metres of you. (Ever noticed ow many bars and restaurants there are here right next to each other, and yet the number of tourists falls each year?)

Have I put you off yet? Good, I didn't think I would........

In Part Two I will deal with types of property and location