Living in Switzerland / Investing in Greece

[Pantelis Papamanolis]

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since I was so excited with something 😊. My name is Pantelis and I'm 34 years old. I grew up in Greece and have been living in Switzerland for the last 10 years.

I've been investing in stocks/bonds/ETFs for almost 5 years now and I've made the big decision together with my wife to focus on real estate investing and start from Greece. 

I'm so excited to find this forum. I read immediately "The book on rental property investing" by Brandon Turner and "Long Distance real estate investing" by David Greene and tomorrow I'm having my first ever appointment with a real estate agent to "interview" them!

I don't know if there are other folks from Europe and even more who are investing in Greece, but if yes, let's connect please!

I'm hoping to become an active member of this community, learn from people here, and hopefully in the future share also my learnings!

Wishing you all a happy new year and looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible!

Cheers,

Pantelis

[Pantelis Papamanolis]

@Mike Lambert thank you so much for the welcome and the response and Happy New Year!
I fully agree with all your points! I've done my own due dilligence and I've created my own models that take into consideration all income / expenses applying to Greece!
What's interesting and maybe a bit demotivating is that for long term renting the numbers are way inferior to the numbers I'm seeing here in the forum and unless I'm missing some critical info, in Greece you can barely cover the mortgage expenses, while taking into consideration repairs/CapEx/Insurance etc.. The resulting CoCROI is maximum 1%.
What's also interesting is that at the moment Greece has some of the highest ROIs in real estate in whole Europe, which means that the situation in other countries is even worst.
In the next couple of days I'll meet with an accountant and a few more real estate agents to do a sanity check on my calculations / assumptions and pick their brains.
Once I have updates I'll share them here! If you have any inputs, they are very welcome! 
Lastly, to your point on focusing in Switzerland, there are quite a few reasons why I'm avoiding it for now, but the most important is my familiarity with Greece, the language (I don't speak well enough any of the Swiss languages) and the easiness to communicate.
My ideal long-term plan is once I set up a good income from Greece to keep expanding also in Switzerland!