The dreaded “haratsi,” a doubled property tax surcharge that was imposed in 2011 by then finance minister Evangelos Venizelos – but is still being applied – will be folded into a single unified property tax scheme on the insistence of the country’s international lenders, but it’s a complicated arrangement.
The Ministry of Finances is still debating the finer details of the upcoming unified real estate tax that will replaced a number of current real estate taxes in 2014. The new tax will reportedly benefit those who own one apartment in areas in a low or medium price range.
The tax will apply to agricultural land as well as urban dwellings (homes, stores, storage facilities etc) on land both within and outside of city planning. The tax will apply to separately to the land and dwellings on said land.
That means that the tax will apply to real estate within city planning zones with a value less than 200,000 euros, as well as empty and unrented buildings that do not have a power supply. It will also apply to all sorts of agricultural land outside of planning zones, which until recently were not liable for any real estate taxes.
The new tax will likely benefit those who own an apartment in low to medium value areas, as well as huge properties that were essentially paying a “double” tax, in the form of the current real estate tax and the emergency tax collected by DEI. Those who own land in small to medium value zones will see a significant increase in their taxes.
To Vima reported that there will likely be three tax scales. The first will apply to buildings regardless of whether they have a power supply or if they are within city planning zones or not. The second scale will apply to plots of land within city planning zones and the third will apply to agricultural land.
The first scale will have 20 smaller scales, depending on the price zone. The first scale will be 2.3 euros per square meter for property in areas with an objective value of 500 euros per square meter, while the final tax scale will be 14 euros per square meter for areas with an objective value of 5,001 euros or higher.
For the second scale, there will also be about 20 different scales, based on the objective value of the property. These scales will range from 0.4 to 4 euros per square meters.
For the final scale, the Ministry of Finances is considering an initial scale of 0.0015 euros per square meter, which will increase according to its distance from the sea, the type of agricultural production and whether there is a building on the land or not.
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