Greek short term rentals: 140,000 properties in tax-audit loophole

The noose around taxpayers who collect income from the short term rental of properties is being tightened by the tax control mechanism after 73,000 property owners were caught in 2022 by the Independent State Revenue Authority-AADE hiding incomes totaling 102 million euros.

Within the month AADE will sign a new memorandum of cooperation with the three sharing platforms Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO which will undertake to send it more and more detailed data on the properties and the incomes obtained by the owners and managers of short-term rental properties .

Short term rentals in the crosshairs – How hidden rents will be uncovered.

Based on these data, the tax control mechanism will profile the taxpayers who became “hoteliers” using the short-term rental method and will carry out targeted checks and cross-checks. Those found to be hiding real estate and income will be automatically expelled from the platforms while facing fines from 5,000 to 20,000 euros. The properties they rent out will not appear on any of the three major short-term rental platforms until they have complied with their tax obligations.

The data that the platforms will start sending from this year will “click” with the electronic systems of AADE, thus opening the way for a new type of express intersections. Based on the data that AADE will gather from the Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO platforms and the Short-Term Property Rental Registry, it will proceed to prefill the codes of the E2 form of the tax return in which the income from real estate is declared. Codes for short-term rentals will be pre-populated but will not be “locked” by AADE. This means that property owners or managers will be able to interfere with the short-term rental income of their properties, which appears pre-populated on the tax return.

According to the AADE data, in the tax declarations submitted in 2022, incomes of 530 million euros from short-term rental properties were declared, with the information stating that this year this figure will exceed 550 million euros.

The three major platforms (Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO) had 140,000 properties registered in 2022 and the cross-check run by AADE showed that:

37% of properties or 51,800 properties were listed on the platforms without a Property Registration Number (AMA) or the AMA declared was invalid.
For 66% of the properties identified without AMA or with a phoney AMA, that is, for 34,188 properties, the taxpayers complied by declaring the properties in the AADE Registry and showed the incomes they obtained by submitting amending declarations.
34% of properties without an AMA or 17,612 properties were “downloaded” from short-term rental platforms.
Recently, 200 villas in Mykonos were caught in the nets of the tax audit mechanism which were rented through a short-term rental platform without documents and without having been declared to the Tax Office, while a hotel in Meteora forgot to declare income of 1.3 million euros.

AADE auditors plan cross-checks of short-term rental rents with the information that taxpayers will declare in this year’s tax returns with the aim of identifying cases of concealment of income from property rental. The audits will start from July 1st and in addition to the previous year’s incomes, the auditors through “smart” tools will search every month the data from the platforms in order to identify those who avoid declaring the reservations and the income they acquire in the Short-term Real Estate Registry Accommodation of AADE.