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.