Aegean property is wonderful + property purchase + permanent residency
Owning a property by the Aegean in Southern Europe has always been a dream for international property investors, and at the same time, throughGolden VisaThe permanent residency obtained (including the permanent residence card renewable every five years) is a tool that high-net-worth families very much need. Among the EU's investment-migration options, Greece is also the only remaining one-step "permanent residence" program. These benefits include (listing only the six most important):
Optimizing tax domicile: obtaining a Greek tax ID and shifting your tax jurisdiction to Greece to achieve legal tax savings. For example: the gains from selling US stocks are tax-free in Greece.
Establishing an EU overseas legal jurisdiction: being able, in Greece, to apply for visas at foreign consulates accredited to Greece, to register a marriage in Greece, and to apply for a Greek criminal-record certificate
Obtaining a physical residence card: the Greek permanent-resident card is itself an ID card, and can serve overseas as proof of EU residence.
Enjoying the financial services of the EU and the Eurozone: opening accounts in Greece, opening accounts at banks across the Eurozone, or opening accounts directly online;
Stock and crypto-asset exchanges: the European platforms of exchanges such as Binance, OKX, and Bybit, as well as investing in global stocks directly from Europe.
Optimizing your second nationality: for example, using citizenship obtained through Caribbean citizenship by investment to purchase property, better leveraging the second nationality's role as an asset vehicle
1. After MIDA, how should you optimize your Greek investment?
Greece has awakened from economic collapse and is now entering another phase of rapid development. One of the most important directions is aligning with global tax and banking systems; therefore, after CRS 2.0, the most critical policy in 2027 is ΜΙΔΑ (MIDA, the Greek Real Estate Digital Analytics System), which makes property transparent.
MIDA, put simply, places property-related data—ATAK (the property's unique number), KAEK (cadastral number), E9 (annual property declaration form), ENFIA (property tax), leasing, and utilities—into a more unified digital environment. Once the data is aligned, what the system can know is no longer just "who owns this property," but "who is the owner, where do they live, where is their country of tax residence, and where do the funds come from."
And MIDA may, through the following two paths, look through directly to the property's actual beneficial owner.
The first:natural-person holding → cross-border data exchange.
If the property is held directly by a natural person, once the property data enters the Greek tax authority's basis, it will, through the OECD,CRS,CARF, the EU DAC1 (the EU Directive on Administrative Cooperation in the field of taxation) series, and administrative cooperation frameworks, aligned with and exchanged with the tax system of the country of origin.
The second:legal-entity holding → look-through to the actual beneficial owner.
If Greek property is held by a company, SPV, family structure, or offshore entity, the EU-required UBO (ultimate beneficial owner) declaration, AML/KYC, beneficial-owner transparency framework, bank due diligence, and annual audit documents will pierce the corporate structure, going straight through to the real natural person. Then back to the first point:natural-person holding → cross-border data exchange.
2. On the Chinese-citizen side: where the information will be exchanged, and what you will be forced to disclose
(1) Where information related to Greek property will be exchanged
China is an OECD CRS participant and has, since 2018, conducted annual automatic exchange of financial-account information with numerous jurisdictions; as of 2025, the number of CRS-participating jurisdictions has exceeded 106.
EU DAC1 already lists real estate "ownership + rental income" as an automatic-exchange category; DAC7 (the short-term-rental-platform data exchange directive) brings the seller and landlord data of short-term rental platforms into intra-EU exchange. The OECD has also published a report on the automatic exchange of real estate information and, through the Common Transmission System (CTS, the OECD's cross-border tax information transmission system), brings real estate tax information into the cross-border exchange infrastructure.
(2) What the consequences are after exchange
The tax obligations of Chinese tax residents cover worldwide income, including overseas wages, dividends, interest, rent, and capital gains. This principle has existed in China's individual income tax system since 1980, and enforcement has been markedly stepped up in recent years. The practical impact lands on four things:
undeclared overseas real estate may be deemed an undeclared overseas asset;
rental income over the years may involve back taxes, late-payment penalties, and administrative fines;
the fund flows in the year of purchase—the foreign-exchange route, payment by relatives, underground banks, transit through Hong Kong, collection and payment by third-party companies—will be directly traced backward under the dual scrutiny of the new foreign-exchange rules and the anti-money-laundering framework;
the fund flows after purchase—rent flowing back, resale proceeds returning to China, cross-border turnover among family members—likewise come under scrutiny, and the source and destination of every transaction must be clearly explainable.
(3) What you will be required to disclose when looked through
Common inquiries in practice:
the correspondence between the property owner's natural-person identity and tax-resident status;
the source and route of the purchase funds and the compliance of the foreign-exchange procedures;
how the money went out;
whether rental income arose over the years, whether it was declared, and whether it was disclosed twice between Greece and China;
whether the property is held by a company or offshore structure; and if so, who the UBO natural person is;
records of fund movements with domestic companies, family members, and partnership relationships.
3. Option one: families that already have a second nationality
If a family already has a second nationality (for example, already holds a Caribbean CBI, Malta, Turkey, Vanuatu, São Tomé and Príncipe, or any other usable nationality).
Phase
Action
Key point
1
Purchase a new property in Greece under the new nationality
Let the owner identity of the new property fall directly on the new nationality, avoiding re-entering MIDA under the identity of the country of origin
2
Migrate the qualifying investment of the existing Greek Golden Visa to the new property
The lawyer and the immigration agent prepare the switch of renewal materials in parallel, ensuringResidencyno gap
3
Exit by selling the old property
Completely end the direct link between the country-of-origin identity and the Greek property, and close off the old exposure surface
The time window must leave a margin:
After purchasing the new property, allow about 2 months, ensuring there is time to handle the migration of the Golden Visa qualifying investment
Then add about 2 months, and to handle compliance reviews such as the transfer of the old property.
passport: Dominica (left), São Tomé (center), Vanuatu (right)
4. Option two: families that do not yet have a second nationality
For families without a second nationality who need to complete restructuring before MIDA is fully interconnected, time will not wait. The priority is:to obtain, within the window, a passport that can serve as the vehicle for acquiring assets.
The options that can currently be locked in to land within a 2-3 month window are:
the citizenship path under Vanuatu's Development Support Program: its approval architecture and biometric system are independent of the Caribbean CBI system, and when the documents are complete the approval cycle is controllable.
the citizenship-by-investment path of São Tomé and Príncipe: operating as the independent path of a small state, and when the documents are fully prepared, the processing time is within a controllable range outside the Caribbean system.
Vanuatu Passport
The positioning of these two passports is very clear:They can provide a clean, explainable, and serviceable nationality basis for the registration of new property ownership, bank KYC, cross-border payments, and the CRS reporting route.
After completing the new nationality, the path returns to option one:
new nationality → purchase of new Greek property → migration of the existing Golden Visa qualifying investment to the new property → transfer of the old property.
The total time window is roughly: new nationality 1-2 months + new-property data in place 2 months + residency migration and transfer of the old property 2 months = about 5-6 months.
The real difficulty of this process lies not in any single step, but inobtaining an overseas nationality+retaining Greek permanent residency+transferring the Greek propertyexecuting them together. Over the past few years, BPROL has accumulated rich experience on the paths of Caribbean CBI, Malta MPRP, Portugal, Turkey, Vanuatu, and São ToméSuccess Stories, and on the Greek local side, we also have a complete suite of local services.
It is now May 2026; if you want to purchase Greek property, or optimize your Greek status, please seize these final one or two months and contact us as soon as possible.
