Building a house in Lefkas, Greece.- Part 2 - Buying the land.

Once we decided to investigate building our own house, we came up with a simple design of a villa, based on one we had rented the winter before. We talked to a couple of building firms and went to see some examples of their work on the island. We received a price for the villa finished to a standard ready to move in. The price looked acceptable and within the budget we had, including allowing for buying a plot of land.

The project was in motion, we set off on the mission to find a suitable plot of land.

  

We looked at around 8 plots of land. There are huge variations about what is the available on the island. The east coast ,sea front plots, are mostly taken up now or are being snapped up for excessive prices by rich foreign purchasers.  It is possible to get a reasonable size plot with a sea view but very high up into the hills, meaning a regular difficult drive to get the shops and amenities.

We concluded that we wanted to be on the flat and were happy to forgo the sea view for this benefit.

After seeing several plots that fitted our criteria we settled on a beautiful plot close to the Rachi waterfalls, at a price that fitted in with our plans.  The next step was to check the plot is registered on the newly formed Greek Land Register. This plot, it turned out, had been recorded incorrectly and belonged to four different people according to the land register. This meant we would need to go to court to have the documents changed and each of these four people would need to sign to say they agreed with the change. It was at this point that we decided to walk away from this piece of land. We promised ourselves, as we went through this process, that the minute something felt wrong, that we would not continue in that direction.

After a short search, we found a new and much better plot not far away from the one we had selected.  It has a lovely creek running alongside and it was actually much bigger. It sits in the olive groves and has 28 olive trees and a selection of lemon and other fruit trees already in place.

We loved it straight away with the only downside being a commercial property opposite. We agreed with the neighbour that we could either plant trees or put up a fence against his boundary to screen any part that we didn’t want to see.

Our Architect checked out the building regulations to ensure this land was approved for building with the local town hall and that all the land registry details were correct. This piece of land had not been registered yet so it was actually easier to ensure it was set up with the correct boundaries.

We then went ahead with the purchase of the land. In order to do this, we needed a Greek bank account and tax number. A notary then drew up a contract, which was also translated into English and both parties signed it and we handed over the money.

Mid-November 2014,we were the proud owners of a 2800 square metre plot of land on Lefkas, pictured above, with a promise from our building team that we would have a house by the following Autumn.   Time will tell…..

Building a House in Lefkas,Greece - Part 1 - Why we built a house?

In the summer of 2014 we sailed from our annual mooring in Lefkas Marina around the Adriatic Sea. After visiting Albania, Montenegro, Croatia and Italy, we made our way back to the Ionian. As we turned the corner around the southern tip of Lefkas, back into the Inland Sea and could set eyes on the islands of Kefalonia, Ithaca and Meganissi, it occurred to us we had not seen anywhere we thought to be more beautiful on our most recent travels. This moment clarified our recent thoughts about settling down on the island of Lefkas. 

Whilst we were sailing, we had seen a personal advert on a social media site, for a house for sale close to the island for what seemed to be a very reasonable price. We decided we should make an appointment to see it as soon as we were back on dry land.

Given the unstable nature of the Greek economy, we decided that we wanted to keep the budget very tight and only spend what effectively we could afford to lose, if a worst scenario happened.

The house we had seen advertised seem to fit all our requirements, a decent size piece of land, at least two bedrooms, room to build a pool, a short drive to amenities such as a supermarket and tavernas.

 

We arranged to see it, although in need of a little modernisation it seemed to be all it promised.  The man that owned the property showed us round in detail and was extremely friendly.  We are quite impulsive people that believe that things happen for a reason, so although this was the only property we had viewed we decided to go ahead with an offer.

The following day, we made the elderly Greek gentleman an offer of the asking price, at which point he informed us he had decided to double the price.  At this news, we walked away wondering what had prompted this reaction, we speculated that he had either changed his mind about selling at all, or just believed as we were ‘affluent foreigners’ we would pay more for his property. Unfortunately, the latter seemed to be more likely as we further investigated how the Greek property market worked.

We continued with our search and spoke to several estate agents. We viewed several properties in our price range and above and reached the following conclusions.

· Properties for sale in the estate agents are nearly all owned by expats and have been priced relatively to what they had been purchased for in better times or slightly reduced by the more realistic vendors.

· The market was very slow and nothing much was moving.

· To get a property in our price range we were going to have to live in a remote village in the mountains and make a number of compromises on our requirements.

A little disheartened we discussed it with a Greek friend of ours, who also happens to be an architect. He suggested that we look at buying a plot of land and building what we wanted. We imagined this would be both expensive and fraught with bureaucracy and unforeseen problems.  We agreed however we would look in to it.