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Housing use has become a true financial burden for both tenants and owners, and this without considering the pressure of taxation that accompanies real estate ownership or exploitation. According to this year's survey of Housing Europe, the European federation of Public, Cooperative and Social Housing, Greeks pay the largest housing costs as a percentage of their disposable income compared with other EU countries.

In particular, housing costs amount to 37% of the income. The rate however reaches 65% for those households that are close to the poverty line. In the European Union, this percentage is 22.2% and 41% respectively. Housing costs include the rent for tenants or the housing loan instalments for owners as well as heating, water, electricity, telephone costs and general expenses in the residential block/building. The continuous contraction of household incomes (e.g. the reduction of salaries and pensions), combined with the constant increase of other costs (of electricity, heating fuel, etc.) are bringing an increasing number of Greeks to an extremely difficult financial situation.
 
The study ranks Denmark second after Greece, as 30% of disposable income there goes for real estate maintenance and Germany third with 28%. It should be emphasized, however, that the percentage of private homes in these two countries is much lower in comparison with Greece. This shows that the share of rental costs is much higher in the total amount of housing costs. At the same time, the conclusion is that Greece's position in the ranking is mainly due to the decline in the incomes of citizens because of the economic crisis and unemployment rather than to a sharp rise in costs. It is significant that based on data from the latest census in 2011, the percentage of private homes in Greece reached 73.2% and of houses to let 21.7%. In Germany, the percentage of private homes was only 45.4% while in Denmark it did not exceed 51%.

Respectively, Greece reported the highest percentage of population that is considered to bear a too heavy burden of housing costs, namely 33.1%.

Interesting is the fact that the country comes first in other negative rankings and has the highest percentage of citizens with arrears to electricity, water or telephone companies at 31.8%. In addition, the percentage of citizens with outstanding housing loans is 14.9%, the percentage of those who owe unpaid rents being similar. This sad ranking puts Ireland in the second position and Cyprus in the third. To recall furthermore that the percentage of bad loans in Greece sharply increased from 3.6% in 2008 to 28.1% of the total portfolio of loans at the end of 2014.

Therefore, the estimates of social workers that the number of homeless in Greece increased by 25% and reached 20,000 in the period 2009-2011 is not surprising. It is clear that this percentage could be even greater if the protection against primary residence auctions were not in force, especially for incomes below 35,000 euro per year.

Simultaneously, the disproportionate burden of housing use has a negative impact on the real estate market. Thus, despite the collapse of private construction activity, particularly in 2011 and afterwards, the number of unsold/empty real estate remained very high. Real estate sales and purchases continued to fall, decreasing by 33.8% in 2014 and numbering less than 10,000 on an annual basis.