Papastergiou: digital shift emerges as a key driver for real estate

The Hellenic Cadastre, as the Minister underlined, lies at the core of this transition and is now reaching 99% completion of the country’s land registry mapping. This milestone carries particular significance, as for the first time every property is assigned a unique identification number (KAEK), establishing a unified and structured national property database.

Despite this progress, significant outstanding issues remain, with hundreds of thousands of cases still requiring clarification—particularly in areas where property transfers were historically conducted without formal registration. The completion of the project therefore does not mark an endpoint, but rather the beginning of a more complex phase of institutional consolidation and maturity.

Particular emphasis was also placed on the technological upgrade of the Cadastre, which, according to Mr. Papastergiou, is migrating to cloud-based infrastructure with the objective of enhancing speed, security, and interoperability of services. This transition is accompanied by the gradual integration of urban planning authorities into a unified digital environment, effectively operating as a “one-stop shop” for investors and property owners.

In parallel, new digital tools are being developed to strengthen transparency and data accessibility. Among them, the National Digital Map stands out, aggregating geospatial information on land use, forest maps, and other critical datasets, enabling faster and more secure investment assessments.

At the same time, the Minister noted that a unified data hub is being created to connect key information sources, including:

• property ownership status
• building permits
• digital property registry data
• energy consumption data

“The consolidation of these datasets is expected to fundamentally transform both policymaking and the way investors evaluate the market,” he said, adding that “a decisive development is also the new public open data platform, which dramatically increases data availability—from a few dozen datasets to thousands. This access creates new opportunities for analysis and application development, strengthening the innovation ecosystem around real estate.”

In the same direction, artificial intelligence infrastructure is being developed through projects such as “Daedalus” in Lavrio, which aims to position Greece as a regional data processing hub. The utilization of these technologies is expected to enable the transformation of large-scale datasets into actionable intelligence for investors, businesses, and public authorities.

Data centers and investment prospects

Finally, special reference was made to the prospects for data center development, with Greece leveraging its geostrategic position as a bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as its growing capacity in renewable energy. The combination of these factors is shaping a new investment narrative in which data and energy increasingly converge.

Overall, digital transformation is redefining the real estate market, shifting it from a fragmented and bureaucratic sector into a more transparent, efficient, and investment-attractive environment. The central challenge now is no longer the deployment of digital infrastructure, but its effective utilization, so that Greece can fully capitalize on its emerging digital advantage.