In Cyprus, where buying property once seemed like a sure-fire way to guarantee stability and domestic comfort, thousands of people have found themselves tangled up in a web of bureaucracy, legal chaos and dodgy practices by developers.
A lot of people on the island still can't get title to their properties, even though they've been paying their mortgages regularly for years.
Stories like that of Solomon Solomu from Limassol have become pretty common. Back in 2008, he bought a big 228 m2 house and always paid his mortgage until the financial crisis of 2013, when his business went under. He tried to restructure his loan and negotiate with the bank, but in the end, he was evicted from his own home and his factory was taken away. It's all because the property was still pledged — not by him, but by the developer, whose debts the bank tried to compensate for at the expense of the buyer. There are thousands of these cases in Cyprus.
The Ministry of the Interior has said that almost 10,000 property owners on the island still don't have the deeds for their houses and flats. More than 5,000 of these are down to the lack of final building permits or problems with the urban development plan. Another 4,000 people have paid for their homes in full but can't get the title because the land is still with the developer. This means that owners can't sell, give or even transfer their property to relatives.
Since 2015, the Cypriot government has tried several times to get involved in the situation: support schemes were introduced, court decisions were proposed, and even separate laws were passed. But experts and borrowers themselves say that no real protection has been provided. The 2015 law tried to solve this problem, but the banks got around it and in 2018 got the law changed to suit them. For example, MP Averof Neophytou admitted that the changes that let banks take people's property without finishing legal proceedings were a mistake.
Lots of buyers found themselves in debt for things they didn't even buy.
The plan was pretty straightforward: banks gave loans to developers, who built housing and sold it to end buyers, but didn't pay back the loans. The land stayed pledged, and the property documents weren't issued. The banks didn't check if the old debt had been paid off before approving new sales. So when the developer went bust, the debt ended up on the people.
Last week, banks and credit institutions were up in arms about a new bill that would give victims access to the courts. Most of the island's banks and such weren't too happy about it, saying that the bill would make it harder to collect debts. Meanwhile, Interior Minister Konstantinos Ioannou said at a meeting that this was 'the best possible solution, as 9,497 buyers are still in limbo.
While Parliament is talking about the new bill, let's hope this isn't just another attempt to pull the wool over the EU's eyes. The affected buyers aren't looking for political statements, they want real action — things like:
- Get the title deeds unblocked.
- We need to make sure that the debts of developers are separate from those of genuine buyers.
- Make sure banks can't just do whatever they want.
The people who've fallen into this trap aren't just statistics. These are families who've been paying off loans for years, believing in the system and hoping for help from the state. Today, they're not looking for sympathy, but for justice. It remains to be seen whether Cyprus will have the courage to admit its mistakes and protect its citizens in the near future.