Athens Court Blocks Airbnb Rentals Under Building's Residential Rules
A court in Athens has ordered an apartment owner to stop renting a unit through Airbnb, ruling that the building's own internal regulations restrict use to residential purposes only. The case was brought by other owners in the same building, not by the city or a national regulator, and the ruling applies to that one property rather than to short-term letting across Athens.
A building bylaw, not a new law
Greek apartment blocks are typically governed by a co-ownership regulation, drawn up when the building was first divided into units, setting out what owners can and cannot do with their space. Many of these documents predate the tourism-letting boom by decades and simply bar commercial or professional use of flats. The court's reasoning was straightforward: running a unit as a short-term rental on a recurring basis counts as commercial activity, and that breaches the residential-only clause regardless of what national tourism law permits elsewhere.
Why national registration doesn't settle the argument
Greece already requires hosts to register short-term rental properties and obtain a registration number that platforms must display. That system governs tax and licensing at the state level. It has no bearing on private civil disputes between co-owners over what a building's own rules allow. A host can be fully compliant with national registration and still be sued, and lose, at building level if neighbours object and the bylaws support them. That distinction is easy to miss and expensive to ignore.
The pattern beyond Greece
Owner associations using internal building rules to shut down short-term lets are not unique to Athens. Similar disputes have surfaced in Spanish and French apartment blocks, where co-owner votes or existing regulations have been used to override what national or municipal STR law otherwise permits. None of these rulings require new legislation, which is what makes them hard to track: they turn on paperwork specific to one building, not on public registers a host can search in advance. Operators running units across several properties in older buildings would do well to actually read the co-ownership regulation before listing, not just check the local licensing rules, and resources such as Lodgify's blog are a reasonable place to keep tabs on this kind of scattered, building-by-building risk.
The immediate effect is narrow: one Athens flat comes off the market for short-term guests. The wider signal is that compliance with city or national STR rules is no longer the whole test. Co-owners with a residential-use clause and the will to litigate now have a workable route to force a host out, court by court, building by building.
