Most owners renovating for rental spend half their money well. The problem is not the amount, it is the allocation: it goes on things that impress during a viewing rather than things that fill a calendar. The difference between those two categories is measurable, and it is not a matter of taste.
Let us start at the conclusion, because one item stands apart from everything else. If the floor plan allows it, a second bathroom is the best investment you will make in the property. Everything else comes after.
Why the second bathroom changes everything
A two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom addresses essentially one market: couples with a child, or friends who do not mind sharing. The same apartment with two bathrooms addresses three entirely different markets at once. Families with older children. Two couples travelling together. And colleagues on a corporate assignment, who are not going to share a bathroom for three months.
It is that third market which moves occupancy, because it has no season. Corporate stays run through November and February, precisely the months when purely touristic apartments empty out. A property that serves all three demand pools does not have a dead period in the same way.
Two bedrooms, two bathrooms: rare in Athens, first in demand
And it is rare. The Athens apartment block of the sixties and seventies was built with a single bathroom as standard, so supply is constrained while demand is not. Before you get excited, though, the question is not whether you want one but whether it is possible: you need a drainage point within a sensible distance and a soil stack that can take it. It is the first thing a plumber checks and the first thing to ask before anything gets designed.
What else pays back
After the bathroom, the order of priority is almost always the same, and it follows the logic of what makes someone keep a booking rather than cancel it.
- Independent air conditioning in every bedroom, heating as well as cooling.
- Double glazing, for the noise before the energy rating.
- A kitchen that genuinely works, with a dishwasher and counter space.
- A washing machine inside the apartment, not on the stairwell.
- Layered lighting, because a single central fitting ruins the photograph.
- Storage and wardrobes, which matter more the longer the stay.
Noise deserves its own mention, because it is the leading cause of a poor review in central Athens and the only one that cannot be fixed afterwards. An apartment on a busy street without proper glazing will collect four-star ratings for reasons that have nothing to do with how good it looks inside.
What is wasted money
Now the harder part. Designer furniture does not raise the nightly rate; it only raises the replacement cost when something breaks, and something will. Expensive natural flooring scratches within a season. Whirlpool baths and unusual sanitaryware generate faults and questions, not bookings.
Themed decoration is the costliest trap of all. An apartment with a strong personality delights a few people and leaves most of them indifferent, while a neutral, well-lit, immaculate apartment thrills nobody in the first second and gets booked by everybody.
You are not designing your home. You are designing something a thousand strangers will like and sixty arrivals a year will survive.
There is one kind of waste that costs twice, because it is also a breach. Converting a living room or a storage space into a bedroom without natural light and ventilation fails the standards under law 5170/2025, which require main-use spaces with natural light and air in the bedrooms. An extra room that cannot be lawfully listed is not an investment. It is an expense.
The furniture is the product
A guest never sees your apartment before booking it. They see twenty photographs alongside another three hundred. Which means the furniture is judged not on how it feels to sit on but on how well it reads on a screen, and simultaneously on whether it survives daily use by people who did not pay for it.
Two criteria, then, and both compulsory: it photographs well and it lasts. Anything meeting only one is a bad purchase. In practice that means a neutral palette, hard-wearing fabrics, solid tables, good mattresses, and consistency across the whole apartment rather than a collection of unrelated pieces. It is work that shows, and there is a reason to hand it to somebody who has seen what breaks first.
What it costs
Market pricing in 2026 gives a clear range. For meaningful work, rather than paint and light fittings, the realistic floor is around €500 per square metre. A full high-specification renovation, taking in bathroom, kitchen, plumbing, electrics and windows, runs to €850 or €1,200 per square metre. For a seventy square metre apartment that means a budget starting at €35,000 and comfortably exceeding €60,000.
State renovation subsidy schemes exist, calculated per square metre with a ceiling of around €300 per square metre, but income and social criteria exclude a good many owners. Worth checking, not worth building the budget around.
The order, if the budget will not stretch to everything: whatever the law requires first, then the second bathroom if it is feasible, then air conditioning and glazing, then the kitchen, and the aesthetics last. It is a boring order and it is the right one.
If you are considering a renovation with letting in mind, send us the floor plan and photographs before the builders start. We will tell you what the market will actually notice and what would be money thrown away, and if you would rather not run it yourself, our team takes on renovation and furnishing from scratch. How the arrangement works is set out in our piece on Airbnb management in Athens.
Find out what your apartment could earn
Send us a floor plan and photographs and we will come back before you spend a euro.
