Thousands of homes found with illegal certificates

There are some 17,000 properties which are currently available for sale, but with serious irregularities, even though they carry certificates of engineers confirming the opposite. They undermine the smooth functioning of the housing market and compress further the already low supply of real estate.

These are properties currently being resold by the owners who acquired them from 2011 onward, that is when the requirement for an engineer's certificate that the property for sale does not carry any irregularities came into force.

This revelation was made by Giorgos Rouskas, president of the Association of Notaries of Greece, in the context of the Premium Real Estate Forum last Saturday.

"We are facing a serious issue today as from 2011 until now we have identified 17,000 transfer contracts in which illegal engineers' certificates were used," said Rouskas. According...