Athens Rolls Out Stricter Rules on Duplicate Property Listings as Rental Crisis Bites

Greek authorities confirmed this week that a coordinated audit of short-term rental platforms had identified thousands of duplicate property listings across Athens, with the highest concentrations found in Koukaki, Monastiraki and the streets immediately south of the Acropolis. The findings, compiled through the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE) alongside the Ministry of Digital Governance, are feeding directly into a broader regulatory push that the Mitsotakis government has been building since late 2024.

The timing matters. Athens is in the middle of its peak tourism season, and accommodation prices in central neighbourhoods have reached levels that price out most long-term residents. A studio apartment in Koukaki that rented for €550 per month in 2019 routinely lists today at more than double that figure, according to data published earlier this year by the Hellenic Property Federation (POMIDA). Against that backdrop, duplicate and ghost listings — properties appearing multiple times under different names or slightly altered addresses — have compounded the distortion by inflating apparent supply while doing nothing to bring actual rents down.

What the Audit Found

The digital sweep, which AADE ran across Airbnb, Booking.com and several smaller platforms during the last ten days of June, cross-referenced unique registration numbers issued under the Greek short-term rental registry — the so-called AMA numbers introduced in 2021 — against active listings. Officials found a meaningful share of listings either lacked valid AMA numbers entirely or had the same number attached to multiple different listings, a pattern consistent with deliberate duplication to game search algorithms and boost visibility.

Monastiraki and Psyrri, where narrow streets around Plateia Monastirakiou are already under pressure from daytime tourist crowds, showed the densest clustering of suspect listings. Exarchia, long resistant to short-term rental conversion, appeared in the data too, suggesting that operators are pushing further into districts that until recently had relatively low Airbnb penetration.

Platforms have been given until July 31 to remove or correct non-compliant listings or face fines under the existing framework. The penalty structure, set under Law 4446/2016 as subsequently amended, allows for fines starting at €5,000 per infraction for operators who list without a valid AMA number. Whether enforcement will match the rhetoric of the audit is a separate question — previous rounds of compliance checks produced mixed results.

Practical Consequences for Landlords and Renters

Property owners operating legitimately are watching the process closely. The Greek Airbnb Operators Association, which represents registered hosts primarily in Attica and the islands, has argued publicly for months that enforcement falls disproportionately on small landlords who own a single apartment and registered in good faith, while large multi-property operators with the resources to game the system face fewer real consequences.

For renters, the immediate practical advice from housing advocates at Klimaka — the Athens-based social organisation that works on housing insecurity — is to document any rental agreement carefully and to verify whether a property's advertised AMA number appears on the official AADE registry before signing or paying a deposit. The registry is publicly searchable at the AADE portal.

The Ministry of Digital Governance is also testing an automated flagging system that would alert AADE in real time when a single AMA number appears attached to more than one active listing — a tool that, if deployed at scale, would make the kind of manual audit conducted last month unnecessary. Ministry officials have indicated a pilot is planned for September, though no formal announcement has been made setting a firm launch date.

For residents of Koukaki and Petralona who have watched their streets transform over the past decade, the audit represents at minimum an acknowledgment that the data problem is real. Whether the July 31 deadline produces a measurable drop in duplicate listings — or simply prompts operators to rotate AMA numbers more carefully — will be the first test of whether this week's enforcement push has any lasting effect.