buyers

Athens, Greece – Tonia Katerini, a 69-year-old architect, leaned into her computer, scrolling through the property contracts that she said are remaking her neighbourhood.

Across Exarchia, the Athens district long known for its radical left-wing politics, flats are being bought up and turned into short-term rentals, pushing out the people who live there.

For months, Katerini and a group of neighbours have been digitally mapping foreign purchases using public records, marking them with red dots.

She zoomed out from her street on the map; it was a sea of red.

The balcony doors of her flat, where she has lived since 1986, were open and noise from the cafes below drifted in past the plants and stacks of architectural plans.

Her group says much of the money behind the rentals is Israeli; by their count, more than half of the area’s new company-run hotels and rentals .

In a neighbourhood where Palestinian flags hang from balconies and solidarity slogans cover the walls, that has caused friction.

On her own cobbled street, where the noise of arriving tourists rolling their suitcases wakes her in the morning, Israeli investors have bought two buildings, she said. The flat below hers belongs to one such company.

“They are nice guys we have downstairs,” she said. “It’s an Israeli company.”

A few streets away, a residential building is streaked with black paint.

“Airbnbs leave us homeless,” reads one slogan across its facade. “Zionists not welcome,” reads another.

Such buildings are easy to spot. Instead of residents’ names, the buzzer panels show only numbers and a keypad by the door releases keys for Airbnb guests.

Across the neighbourhood, activists have splattered keypads and facades with red paint.

They say short-term rentals are driving an aggressive gentrification that is pricing out locals and erasing the area’s identity.

Foreign money has poured into Greek property in recent years: non-residents invested a record 2.75 billion euros ($3.2bn) in Greek real estate in 2024, according to the Bank of Greece, before easing last year.

No official figures break down foreign buyers in Athens by nationality. But an annual survey of completed sales by the agency network RE/MAX Hellas found that Israelis were the largest group of foreign buyers in Attica, the region around the capital, ahead of buyers from Turkiye and Lebanon, reported the Greek weekly To Vima.

Exarchia’s political activism runs deep. In 1973, students at the nearby Athens Polytechnic rose up against the US-backed military government, which fell the following year.

In 2008, police shot dead Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old Greek student, in Exarchia, provoking protests that spread across the country. It came, Katerini said, like “fire on dry land”.

As Greece’s debt crisis deepened, that anger on the streets helped propel the left-wing Syriza party to power in 2015.

‘Tenants displaced, apartment blocks emptied’

Chrysoulla Papageorgiou, a schoolteacher who has lived in Exarchia for 24 years, is a familiar face on its streets. Earnest and straight-talking, the 46-year-old remembers it as “a neighbourhood of solidarity”.

The change came slowly, then quickened. At first, small owners rented out a spare room. After the COVID-19 pandemic, companies began buying entire blocks.

“Overnight, tenants were displaced and apartment blocks emptied,” she said.

Bars opened, spilling tables and chairs across pavements on streets that had once been quiet.

Rents rose and migrants and low-income families, many living in basements and on the lower floors, were the first to go. Schools lost pupils and old bookshops, traditional cafes and grocers closed.

For years, Exarchia residents sheltered refugees in occupied buildings. Sitting on prime real estate, they were among the first buildings police emptied and then sold, Papageorgiou said.

“Half were squats,” she said. “Now we have only one.”

That last building is draped in painted sheets declaring solidarity with the families inside. Neighbours help make sure the children get to school.

Since 2022, Exarchia Square, long the heart of the neighbourhood’s protests, has been a fenced-off construction site for a new metro station that many residents fought against. Riot police, Papageorgiou added, are now a daily presence.

The aim, she believed, is to turn central Athens into somewhere “purely touristic”.

In recent years, buyers have been “almost only Israeli”.

Near the square hangs a large Palestinian flag. Tourists sometimes scrawl anti-Palestinian messages on its white stripe, and activists paint it white again.

Foreign buyers, Katerini said, see Greece as a safer place for their money than Israel itself, and in Athens “the government is very friendly with Israel”. In August, Athens signed a missile deal with Israel worth $3.5bn.

‘A very good opportunity’ for investors

Vagelis Lazaridis, a stocky real estate agent who heads a branch of the Athens-Attica Real Estate Agents’ Association, talks about his trade with passion. He said the reasons for the investments were purely practical.

Exarchia “was a run-down area” which made it “a very good opportunity”, he said.

It is beside the centre, close to the metro and to universities full of students from abroad. Unlike Plaka, beneath the Acropolis, it has few building restrictions.

Once a handful of buyers arrive, he said, others follow.

Greece to become ‘far less appealing’ for Israeli buyers

The government is now trying to cool the market.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced last month that the transfer tax for homebuyers from outside the European Union would rise from 3 percent to 15 percent from next July.

“The party is over in Greece,” The Jerusalem Post wrote in a recent report. “The country, which in recent years has become a preferred destination for Israelis seeking real estate investments at reasonable prices and with attractive yields, is about to become far less appealing.”

Lazaridis said agents’ associations oppose the plan, which has yet to become law. It “may not take effect, or may be postponed”, he said.

Agents expect some non-EU buyers to speed up purchases before the deadline, reported the Greek news site in.gr.

‘Fewer Airbnbs’

Not everyone in the trade sees an unstoppable tide.

Iryna Rondyak, who is originally from Ukraine, runs her own estate agency near Exarchia. She said that when Israeli buyers began arriving about a decade ago, they made up about 60 percent of her foreign clients, many buying whole office buildings to turn into hotels.

Until around 2024, foreigners accounted for about 70 percent of her sales, she said.

This year, it is about 30 percent, as state-backed mortgages for young Greeks, under a scheme called “Spiti mou” (My Home), attract local buyers back.

She credits new rules for the turnaround.

No new short-term rental licences are being issued in central Athens, including Exarchia, and in September the freeze was extended to the end of 2027, reported To Vima.

Properties bought under Greece’s “golden visa” residency scheme can now only be let long-term. While a cheaper route into the scheme, at 250,000 euros ($280,000), rewards investors who convert empty office buildings into flats.

“Anyone living in Greece couldn’t find a home in the centre. Everything was on Airbnb,” she said. “Now there are far fewer.”

It is “a little better,” she said, but “the problem still exists”.

Rents remain high, at 10 to 15 euros ($12 to $17) per square metre, even in the southern suburbs, she said. Many flats sit empty because owners find renting them out is not worth the tax bill.

Residents are less convinced.

The rental freeze is temporary, they say, and investors with enough money can still find ways in. Nor does it undo what has already happened: many of the neighbourhood’s buildings are already short-term rentals.

Back in Exarchia, Papageorgiou counts herself lucky.

Her landlady, whose family has lived in the area for generations, refuses to raise the rent as an “act of resistance”.

Papageorgiou said jokingly that her landlady’s accountant has told her she is ruining the market.

Afghan miners endure harsh conditions, relying on basic tools to extract precious emeralds in Panjshir’s steep valleys.

Panjshir, Afghanistan — At a packed hall in the offices of the Panjshir provincial government, an auction is under way and the bidding is brisk.

The buyers, many from Kabul and some from overseas, have already closely examined the small piles of roughly cut green stones, shining their phone flashlights through them to check their quality.

Bidding for the best stones is competitive.

“Panjshir emeralds have many buyers around the world because of their very high quality,” gem merchant Ghulam Mustafa Habibi told Al Jazeera. “This is why their price is higher compared with other emeralds around the world.”

By the end of the auction, nearly 3,000 carats of the precious stones were sold – the 23rd sale of its kind so far this year. The value of emeralds sold to date in Afghanistan is estimated to be nearly 400m Afghanis ($6.12m), a steep rise compared with last year.

For a country impoverished by years of war and burdened by international sanctions, the trade in precious minerals is a valuable resource, especially in the remote corner of northeastern Afghanistan.

“Thankfully, more than 15,000 people are currently employed in Panjshir’s mining sector,” says Muhammad Aman Rezaii, a mining official responsible for overseeing the operation of many small artisanal mining operations dotting the Panjshir valley.

On the valley’s steep hillsides, miners toil for hours underground to make a living. In the otherwise barren and rocky landscape, which yields little, the precious stones are a lifeline.

“There are hardly any companies or manufacturing factories here. The main source of employment is the mining sector,” said Rezaii, adding that they have identified more than 2,000 other mining sites which could be developed.

Since taking power in 2021, the Taliban say they have signed deals with dozens of investors, mainly Chinese, Russian and Iranian, to mine gemstones and other valuable minerals.

According to the World Bank, state revenues rose 22 percent year-on-year in April and May, boosted by the auction of mines and other resources such as oil and precious minerals.

But Afghanistan’s gemstone mining sector is still lacking in international investment and expertise.

“There have been various proposals to establish an international market for Afghanistan’s precious minerals, particularly in Kabul,” Hafiz Muhammad Agha Hakim, the Governor of Panjshir province, told Al Jazeera.

“Processing machinery could be brought in so that these minerals can be processed and standardised here before being exported to markets around the world. At the moment, there is no standardised centre or proper processing facility.”

Back in the dusty confines of his mine, working in near-total darkness, miner Mahdi wields a crowbar while his friend beside him hits the surface with a hammer. He bemoans their lack of modern equipment.

“There are many challenges because we don’t have advanced equipment,” he says, taking a break from the digging. “We work only with basic tools such as shovels, pickaxes, drills and similar equipment.”

Rezaii said the miners need proper equipment that can make their work easier and safer, while also allowing the minerals to be extracted in a more professional manner. This would benefit the people of Afghanistan and particularly the miners,” he said.

“The area is vulnerable to landslides, avalanches, flooding and falling rocks. People here are working under extremely difficult and demanding conditions.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom last week signed legislation cracking down on the practice of luxury-car buyers in California registering cars out of state to avoid taxes.

Senate Bill 1406, introduced by state Sen. Jerry McNerney (D-Pleasanton), closes the so-called Montana loophole, in which tax evaders create shell companies in Montana or other states without sales tax or vehicle registration fees and use them to purchase Ferraris, Porsches and other luxury cars. The state estimate it loses millions of dollars annually because of such schemes.

The new law expands California’s definition of who is a resident under state sales tax law in an effort to weed out phony shell companies, making a company liable for state taxes when at least one member of the business is a California resident.

The law, which went into effect immediately, also authorizes the state tax agency to impose tax liability on individual members of a business.

California had already looked to enforcement efforts to investigate suspicious out-of-state car sales, which officials estimate amount to $10 million annually in lost tax revenue.

Under state law, residents were already required to pay California sales tax on vehicles unless they are first used out of state and stay out of state for at least 12 months. Dealers are required to maintain records showing sales of vehicles so that authorities can ensure vehicles sold to buyers in another state are actually delivered there.

Earlier this year, the state’s Department of Justice charged 14 people — including auto dealers and customers purchasing cars — with concealing the purchase of more than $20 million worth of high-end vehicles including Ferraris, Porsches and Lamborghinis, and evading upward of $1.8 million in state taxes.

Text messages included in the criminal complaint showed buyers seeking to conceal their purchases. One Lamborghini buyer boasted about fees avoided: “70k saved — I can’t believe Montana registration lasts for 5 years — that’s crazy. Stupid California. Paid 3k to own a 600k car for 5 years — lol in Cali that’s like 75k for 5 years. Hella dumb.”

The new law further develops criteria to help show an LLC as a shell company involved in a potential tax evasion scheme.

If the LLC lacks a specific business activity or purpose, fails to maintain a physical location outside California, fails to employ people, or fails to file federal tax returns in another state, it could now be considered as evidence of such a scheme.