In Greece, Property Is Debt • Hacker News Board

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#91

Post by webscaleizfun » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 1:57 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #55

webscaleizfun wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What area are you in? Compared to Seattle/Portland/San Diego prices, 40k euros seems cheap for a 1963 670sqft apt. A similar house in Tacoma would run 110k euros right now, and it is a terrible location.

ferongr is in Greece presumably. Compared to UK prices (at least in the south east) 110k euros is phenomenally cheap itself.

Dude, you can't even buy a crackerbox in Seattle for 300k euros anymore, a 500sqft apartment has gone from 270k euros to 400k euros in the past 2 years, and that is before the 4500 euros you'll pay to go to an "exclusive" wine tasting/auction to bid on the few units that are up for sale.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#92

Post by simosx » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 1:57 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #74

Let's get facts straight: The state property tax in Greece is 0% for property up to €200K. Then 0.2 to 1% from €200K to €5M. Then 2% above €2M. Property taxes are hardly killing the Greek economy and especially not for the poor or the middle class. On the contrary, Greeks are paying very little. The problem is that Greeks used to have much more property than for example Northern Europeans. For comparison, in Denmark…

There has been an emergency additional property tax (called ΕΝΦΙΑ) and at some point will be merged with other property taxes. For an appartment or a house, the tax amounts to about one or two months of rent, if the property was rented.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#93

Post by imaginenore » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 1:57 PM UTC

andmarios wrote: post #58

imaginenore wrote: post #2

The article mentions the word "tax" 14 times, but it never says what it actually is. How bad is it?

You have to factor in that we have an extremely high unemployment rate (23.5%) and after the austerity measures the basic wage is about 550 euro/month. Many, if not most, companies took advantage of this basic wage change and forced it upon their employees or replaced them with new ones (which can't ask for more). Also another big part of the workforce is on flexible-hours, which means they may go as low as 120 euro…

So why not accept the inheritance and sell the house?

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#94

Post by dozzie » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #83

flexie wrote: post #74

Let's get facts straight: The state property tax in Greece is 0% for property up to €200K. Then 0.2 to 1% from €200K to €5M. Then 2% above €2M. Property taxes are hardly killing the Greek economy and especially not for the poor or the middle class. On the contrary, Greeks are paying very little. The problem is that Greeks used to have much more property than for example Northern Europeans. For comparison, in Denmark…

Most of Europe at this point has no or almost no property tax.

Wikipedia disagrees on "has no property tax", and it's hard to tell anything about "has almost no property tax".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax#United_Kingdom

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#95

Post by ferongr » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #66

> "And yet, the leftist government recently proposed adding further documents and costs to selling or renting property — a compulsory “energy performance” certificate and a civil engineer’s assurance that there are no illegal constructions." Not an expert, nor a citizen/resident, but these seem like a basic things to do. Parents back home had to provide same things recently just for renovation, and much more. There a…

More often than not, most high-rise construction (that means... anything above 2 floors when it comes to Greece) is good, especially after the changes to the seismic code after the 1999 earthquake. A small drop in building quality came during the 80s.

More problematic are single homes where the owner of the land who contracts their construction decides to take shortcuts, as well as industrial buildings (the RIKOMEX building at the 1999 earthquake

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#96

Post by mfukar » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #82

cgio wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's get facts straight. The state property tax in Greece is calculated on a nominal value far removed from market value. This means that a 300K nominal value property cannot sell today for 150K (I know, I have tried.) In practice, as the article mentions property value approaches zero as the market is incredibly shallow. Recalculate on the basis of that and then make the comparison.

I didn't pretend to describe all the rules in detail. In Denmark, property taxes are also calculated based on values that are not the current market value. Currently, 95% of Danes pay the state property tax based on a 2001/2002 value assessed by the tax authorities.

No, you just pretended that the state property tax is very close to 0%, without mentioning WHAT is taxed at "very little" 0%.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#97

Post by cgio » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #82

cgio wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's get facts straight. The state property tax in Greece is calculated on a nominal value far removed from market value. This means that a 300K nominal value property cannot sell today for 150K (I know, I have tried.) In practice, as the article mentions property value approaches zero as the market is incredibly shallow. Recalculate on the basis of that and then make the comparison.

I didn't pretend to describe all the rules in detail. In Denmark, property taxes are also calculated based on values that are not the current market value. Currently, 95% of Danes pay the state property tax based on a 2001/2002 value assessed by the tax authorities.

2001/2 value assessment I would expect to be lower than current market price in Denmark?

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#98

Post by StavrosK » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

ferongr wrote: post #43

StavrosK wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is about a month's rent for it.

I'm not complaining, I don't have any more property on my name and I think it's reasonable.

I'm saying that 250 euros might sound low until one considers that it's about 8% of the entire income the property would make when rented.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#99

Post by simosx » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #50

simosx wrote: post #17

Apart from inheritance, the parents can also set up a form of "parental donation" of their property to their children, but continue to make full use of the property (live on the property or keep all the rent) as long as they are alive. And the difference between "inheritance" and "parental donation", is that the latter was set up decades ago when it was cheap to do so. What you are reading in this article is cases wh…

> What you are reading in this article is cases where they did not plan for the future. Weird how that sentence became what it is with the benefit of hindsight. If things had gone the other way, and inheritance was cheaper than parental donation, you'd be saying "those chumps donated when it was more expensive and did not plan for the future". It's easy to plan for the future when you already know what it will be. In…

The wording could have been better.

My stronger point in the reply should be my hunch that many of the inheritances may not be profitable enough to pay the inheritance tax. There should be an article that dives into those rejected inheritances and figure out what exactly was not accepted.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#100

Post by ferongr » Wed, Nov 02, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

simosx wrote: post #92

flexie wrote: post #74

Let's get facts straight: The state property tax in Greece is 0% for property up to €200K. Then 0.2 to 1% from €200K to €5M. Then 2% above €2M. Property taxes are hardly killing the Greek economy and especially not for the poor or the middle class. On the contrary, Greeks are paying very little. The problem is that Greeks used to have much more property than for example Northern Europeans. For comparison, in Denmark…

There has been an emergency additional property tax (called ΕΝΦΙΑ) and at some point will be merged with other property taxes. For an appartment or a house, the tax amounts to about one or two months of rent, if the property was rented.

It's not an "emergency" tax.