The house that's bigger than its permit
The closed veranda, the extra bedroom, the pool that appeared one summer. Common enough to have a whole legal regime, costly enough to price into your offer.
Walk through almost any Greek village or coastal settlement and you are looking at buildings that differ from their permits. A veranda glazed in for winter, a storeroom that became a bedroom, a basement dug out under a house that was permitted without one. These are αυθαίρετα, unpermitted works, and Greece has spent two decades building a system to declare, fine and regularise them, most recently under Law 4495/2017.
Why it lands on the buyer
A Greek property cannot legally change hands without an engineer's certificate (βεβαίωση μηχανικού) stating either that the building matches its permits or that any deviations have been declared and settled. In practice this means every undeclared square metre becomes a transaction problem, and the settlement cost, which scales with the size and category of the violation, becomes a negotiation between buyer and seller. If nobody raises it until the notary stage, it becomes a delay, a price fight, or both, at the worst possible moment.
Not everything can be legalised
Most deviations within a legally permitted building can be settled with fines and paperwork. But some cannot be regularised at all: structures on the foreshore (αιγιαλός), on forest-classified land, inside archaeological zones or on common land. A house that stands partly on land it should not is not a paperwork problem; it is a demolition exposure with a price of zero attached to that part of the structure.
The question is never "has it been standing for years without trouble?" It is "what does the permit say, what exists, and can the gap between them be closed, at whose cost?"
The quiet knock-on effects
Undeclared works distort more than the sale. Declared area drives property tax; insurance may not respond for structures that legally do not exist; a future renovation permit will force the discrepancy into the open; and settlement fines are periodically revised, usually not downward. Buying "as seen" without quantifying the gap means inheriting all of this at an unknown price.
What to confirm before you commit
- The full permit file (οικοδομική άδεια and approved drawings) against a walk-through of what is actually built.
- Any existing regularisation declarations: what was declared, in which category, and whether payments are complete.
- The engineer's certificate, commissioned or independently reviewed on your side, not just accepted from the seller.
- Whether any part of the structure sits on land that makes it non-regularisable: foreshore, forest, archaeological, common.
- A settlement-cost estimate for anything undeclared, so it enters the price negotiation rather than the closing week.
None of this makes a property unbuyable. Most αυθαίρετα are resolvable. The point is to know the number before the number knows you.
Reading about the risk is free. Measuring it is £99 (€115).
The AVLI Risk Snapshot ranks these themes for your exact plot and, where your papers and location allow, runs preliminary checks no listing will: the out-of-plan arithmetic, the deed-against-survey cross-check, the measured distance to the shore.