Posted on 05/07/2012 3:37:36 PM PDT by dynachrome
Athens has the highest rate of empty office space in Europe, according to data for the year’s first quarter presented by BNP Paribas Real Estate.
Its report on the course of the European office market showed that the availability rate in the Greek capital soared to 20 percent in the January-March period from 15.5 percent in the same period last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at ekathimerini.com ...
Also, from another article, same source:
"Online tourism bookings from abroad are pointing to a 12.5 percent decline for this year, according to the Airfasttickets travel agency.
Nikos Koklonis, head of the company that owns the agency, says that the biggest drop in bookings for Greek destinations this year is from the German market, which last year accounted for 15 percent of all bookings. Its share has now shrunk to just 3 percent.'
Office rent is cheap in Greece as long as your office space don’t get burnt down by crazed commies...
Greek officials were demanding more in war (WWII) reparations than the $67million already paid.
A nifty little Greek business story.
Back before the Olympics...an American Fortune-500 company came along and offered to bring the Greek authorities, the Greek police, the Greek military and everyone else....along into the modern times. They would be a communications system, database, and operating software to help them during the Olympics. Everything was agreed upon.
Then, the Greeks started to lay out unwritten conditions. All of the Americans involved in this project...had to come to Greece....NO work outside of the country. So the company paid a hefty price to have every software guy and engineer to Greece. Continual problems arose....the guys had to pay Greek taxes and social programs.
As the Olympics approached...the software was delivered and met most of the expectations. The company expected to have some of the promised Greek money paid now. Well....the Greeks announced that whoever signed this silly agreement....didn’t have the full cooperation of the entire government. So nothing was really going to be paid out and this would be handled via the Greek court system.
The company? Well....they went to Greek court and found that it’d take years and if they ever got more than half of what was promised....they’d be lucky. So this was declared a loss for the most part. I think Greece paid like five to ten cents on the dollar for what they contracted for.
If you had to pick a society of losers...this is it.
[ I would imagine office space in America combined with empty storefronts in malls, strip malls and stand-alone buildings rivals that percentage.
Just saying I think we are as bad off as Greece, nearly, in relation to business operations. ]
A lot of those statistics are blatantly ignored by the MSM...
Tax the landowners 25% on the value of all unoccupied buildings! Then tax that man behind that tree!
[ As the Olympics approached...the software was delivered and met most of the expectations. The company expected to have some of the promised Greek money paid now. Well....the Greeks announced that whoever signed this silly agreement....didn’t have the full cooperation of the entire government. So nothing was really going to be paid out and this would be handled via the Greek court system.
The company? Well....they went to Greek court and found that it’d take years and if they ever got more than half of what was promised....they’d be lucky. So this was declared a loss for the most part. I think Greece paid like five to ten cents on the dollar for what they contracted for. ]
I would have pulled out with such force that the Greek Officials would have been still feeling the pain.
I would have given them back their data on 5-1/4 inch floppy disks and filled a small warehouse with them as I pulled the DB servers out of their data center without even switching them off properly.
I would refund their money (in the most inconvienient method via the smallest denomination that the euro has ) and take every single piece of equipment, software, clibboard, printout and pencil that my company installed back to the US as soon as possible.
It would have been a “loot-back-refund/reposession” and would have been executed in the dead of night and when those miserable greek officials woke up the next morning they would feel the meaning of the term “greek fire”.
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