Who pays when a defect appears: contractor liability in Greece, France, Quebec, and the US

Table of contents

1. Four liability universes
2. North America is not one system
3. The Greek Civil Code: acceptance, the clock, and the remedy ladder
4. What acceptance looks like on a real delivery day
5. Structuring the CapEx risk yourself
6. Two more exposures: site wages and your consumer-law backstop
7. Athens' structural inheritance and the digital net
8. Where this leaves an asset manager

In France, if a structural defect appears in the ten years following a renovation, an insurer funds the repair before anyone establishes whose fault it was. In Greece, that insurer does not exist. Neither does it in the United States, or in most of English-speaking Canada.

None of that makes Athens riskier than Paris, Montreal, or Miami. It makes Athens a market still priced, in part, for owners who never look closely at what they are buying. The ones who do look come out ahead, and the mechanism by which they come out ahead is specific: the risk that an insurer carries elsewhere is here reallocated by contract, before signature, or not at all.

1. Four liability universes

France's loi Spinetta (1978) built a two-insurance system. Contractors carry mandatory ten-year decennial liability insurance. Owners carry assurance dommages-ouvrage, which prefinances repairs immediately, with no wait to establish fault. Quebec's Civil Code builds something structurally similar through Article 2118 CCQ: a five-year presumed, solidary liability regime for loss of the work. The US and most of English-speaking Canada rest on contract law, implied warranties, and time-limited rights to sue, with no insurer prefinancing anything by default.

Greece never adopted an equivalent, and this is not an oversight. There is no compulsory decennial insurance for private construction. Liability sits in the general contract-for-work provisions of the Greek Civil Code (GCC), Articles 681 to 702, and the burden of proving both a defect and the contractor's fault falls on the owner [1].

	France	Quebec	US and ON / BC / AB	Greece
Liability basis	Strict, no fault required	Presumed solidary, rebuttable	Contractual, fault must be proven	Contractual, fault must be proven
Compulsory insurance	Yes, both sides	No, liability is a legal presumption	New builds only, where a statutory plan applies	No
Prefinancing	Insurer pays within days	None	None	None
Covers renovation	Yes	Yes, Articles 2118 and 2120	Ordinary contract law only	Ordinary contract law only
Owner's burden of proof	Minimal	Light	Full	Full
Transfers to a later buyer	Automatic	Runs with the immovable	Varies	Only if contractually assigned [3]

Where there is no prefinancing insurer, the pre-acceptance inspection performs the function an insurer performs elsewhere: it establishes, in writing and before money moves, what condition the work was actually in.

2. North America is not one system

North America is not one regulatory zone. The split runs along the same civil-law versus common-law line that separates France from Greece, and it matters because most foreign investors misidentify which side of it they come from.

Quebec is the outlier. Article 2118 CCQ gives an owner five years from completion, during which the contractor, architect, and engineer are presumed jointly liable for loss of the work, and the owner needs only to show that the loss occurred inside that window. Article 2120 adds a one-year workmanship warranty from acceptance. Both apply to renovation work under a contract for work.

The rest of the continent runs on statutory new-build warranty programs or plain contract law. Ontario's Tarion splits coverage into three windows from the possession date: one year for workmanship, materials, and Building Code compliance, two years for water penetration and for the electrical, plumbing, and heating delivery systems, and seven years for major structural defects [4]. British Columbia and Alberta operate tiered mandatory schemes on a similar model.

In the United States, the mechanism is an implied warranty of habitability paired with a statute of repose that runs from substantial completion and varies by state. Colorado sets six years, extendable to eight in certain circumstances [5]. Washington sets six years but works differently: the claim must accrue within six years of substantial completion or of termination of services, whichever is later, and the ordinary limitation period then runs from accrual, so total exposure can extend past six years [6]. Pennsylvania sets twelve years, and bars the claim even where the defect was never discovered inside the window [7]. Note that the Pennsylvania figure is under active pressure: a bill in the current session would cut it to six years, and two cases are pending before the state Supreme Court [8].

Here is the part that matters. Every one of those mandatory Canadian programs applies only to new homes sold by a licensed builder-vendor. Renovation work, which is what most foreign investors in Athens are actually commissioning, falls outside all of them and back onto ordinary contract law.

So for an investor arriving from Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, or anywhere in the US, the honest comparison is not that Greece protects them less. It is that Greece protects them about as much as home already does for anything other than a brand-new build. Quebec is the exception, not the rule, and an investor from Montreal is the one who genuinely needs to recalibrate.

3. The Greek Civil Code: acceptance, the clock, and the remedy ladder

Article 692: acceptance closes the door. Once you accept and approve completed work, the contractor is released from liability for apparent defects. Two things survive acceptance: latent defects that a normal inspection could not have caught, and defects deliberately concealed (dolus) [1]. Everything else you could reasonably have seen, you are treated as having accepted.

Worth knowing who is permitted to do the looking. The inspection counts as properly carried out whether it is performed by the owner, by the owner's representative, by a third party entrusted with inspection and approval, or by a qualified expert where commercial custom and good faith mean a non-specialist could not reasonably have detected the specific defects [1]. Sending someone competent in your place is not a workaround. It is the mechanism the article already contemplates.

Article 693: the clock. Claims for building defects prescribe after ten years from acceptance. Movable fittings get six months [3]. The clock runs from acceptance, not from discovery, so a defect surfacing in year nine leaves very little room.

Legal action	Limitation period	Runs from
Contractual claim, building defects (GCC 693)	10 years	Formal acceptance
Non-conformity claim (L. 2251/1994)	5 years	Physical delivery
Defective-product liability (Art. 6, L. 2251/1994)	3 years, 10-year cap	Discovery of damage, defect, and responsible party [10]
Tort claim (GCC 914)	5 years, 20-year cap	Knowledge of damage and perpetrator

Articles 688 to 691: the remedy ladder. Minor defects (688) get correction or a price reduction. Substantial defects that make the work unusable (689) allow termination. Contractor fault (690) allows damages. Owner-caused defects (691) exclude contractor liability, unless the contractor failed to advise against the owner's instruction. These provisions are non-mandatory, so extending liability by contract is legal [3]. Articles 330 to 332 set the floor: no clause can excuse gross negligence or wilful misconduct [2].

The practical consequence of 692 is that the distinction between apparent and latent is not a legal question at the moment it matters. It is a technical one, decided by what a competent person standing in the room actually detects.

4. What acceptance looks like on a real delivery day

A bathroom and plumbing renovation, Athens, summer 2026. First delivery inspection, owner represented, 244 checkpoints across five LOT asset classes.

18 Critical Failures at first delivery. Acceptance is refused, re-inspection is dated four days out, and the contractor's liability under Article 692 remains open.

Delivery refused. 18 reserves, each carrying its own reference, its own photograph, and its own lift-by date. That structure is the point. A reserve is not a complaint about the job in general. It is a specific, dated, evidenced exception to acceptance, and it is what keeps Article 692 from closing. Which also means its value is entirely conditional on that reserve still being retrievable, photograph and date intact, in year seven.

Reserve R-04, LOT 04, finishes and surfaces:

Hollow sound in the line from sink to shower, found by tap test. Invisible to the eye, audible in twenty seconds.

Look at what that finding is. The tiling is finished, level, and clean. Nothing about it reads as defective. The void beneath it is detected only because someone walked the floor tapping it, listening for the change in tone that says the adhesive bed did not take. Under Article 692, if that reserve is not raised before acceptance, the argument afterwards is whether a normal inspection could have caught it. The contractor will say yes. And on this specific defect, the contractor would be right.

That is where the LOT taxonomy earns its keep. LOT 04 waterproofing sealed behind finished tile is the textbook latent defect, genuinely undetectable without opening the wall. A hollow bed under that same tile is apparent, to a tap test. LOT 02 condensate drainage is apparent to anyone who runs the unit for twenty minutes, and invisible to everyone who does not. Same room, same day, three different positions on the 692 line, and the position is set by method rather than by luck.

One more detail from this inspection, and it is the one worth carrying into any delivery. The unit had no electricity supply on the day. Every functional checkpoint that depended on power stayed open: socket testing, lighting circuits, RCD trip test, circuit labelling verified by switching each way, climate unit cooling and heating cycles. A contractor proposing handover in that state is proposing that the owner accept LOT 01 and the climate elements of LOT 02 untested. An asset cannot be delivered if it cannot be energised, and the reason to say so out loud at the door is that acceptance does not distinguish between checks you failed and checks you never ran.

The mechanics of running a delivery inspection properly deserve their own treatment.

5. Structuring the CapEx risk yourself

With no insurer behind Greek private construction, a major defect becomes an immediate CapEx event, pursued through civil court against a contractor whose solvency you do not control. Three instruments come closest to a French or Quebec-style safety net. None of them appear by default. Article 694 makes the contractor's fee payable on delivery, but the provision is soft law, so the parties are free to agree retention on payments or a bank guarantee instead [3].

Latent Defects Insurance. Voluntary, but it can be required of a developer as a condition. Covers structural CapEx for up to ten years post-delivery.

Retention and completion guarantee. Withholds 5 to 10% of contract value in escrow for one to two years after handover, funding urgent Technical Project Management without a renegotiation each time.

First-demand bank guarantee. Secures liquidity for technical failures regardless of the contractor's cash position.

Concretely, here is what the absence of the second one costs. A different delivery, a different asset, the same blank field.

No retention percentage was ever agreed in the contract. With reserves open, the recommendation was to withhold the full contract value until reinspection.

No retention had been agreed at signature, so the only leverage available at delivery was money not yet paid. The recommendation was to withhold the full contract value, pending reinspection. Note the basis line: release is recommended after reinspection, not withheld indefinitely. A retention holds until the work is right. It is not a penalty, and framing it as one is how owners lose the argument.

That leverage existed because the payment timing happened to be favourable. Had the contract been drawn down in progress tranches, as most are, the sum available to withhold at delivery would have been whatever remained, and it can easily fall short of the cost of the open reserves. Retention removes the coincidence. An owner who agrees 10% at signature is not buying a bigger number, they are buying a sum that is already parked and already earmarked, released against reserves closed one by one rather than against a date in a calendar. Ask for it before signature, in writing.

Everything above concerns recourse after delivery. Two exposures work the other way, and both are cheaper to handle before signature than after.

6. Two more exposures: site wages and your consumer-law backstop

Article 702 gives site workers a direct action against the owner for unpaid wages the contractor owes them, capped at whatever the owner still owes that contractor, and a contract term purporting to exclude it is unenforceable [3]. If a general contractor fails mid-project, their unpaid crew can come to you. Their financial position becomes your Asset Risk. The mitigation is procedural and dull: verify payroll and social-security settlement certificates before releasing each payment tranche, and make that verification a written condition of release.

Law 2251/1994, as amended, is the real backstop for anyone buying as a private individual rather than through a company [9]. It voids one-sided clauses in professional-to-consumer contracts automatically: unreasonable shortening of complaint windows, exclusion of statutory liability, unilateral changes to specification or price without a penalty-free right of withdrawal, and forced foreign-court or arbitration recourse. Separately, Article 6 imposes strict, no-fault liability on manufacturers of defective building components such as boilers, HVAC units, and insulation, creating joint liability across manufacturer, importer, and supplier independently of your main contract [10]. Which means a failed component has two routes of recovery, not one, and the second route survives a contractor who has disappeared.

7. Athens' structural inheritance and the digital net

Much of Athens' housing stock carries the fingerprints of antiparochi (αντιπαροχή), the mid-century arrangement trading land for finished apartments. It left three technical legacies worth knowing before a first visit.

Variable concrete quality. Much of this stock predates modern seismic code, and carbonation and reinforcement corrosion progress invisibly. Ask for the build year and the permit date before anything else. They tell you which code era you are in.

Unfinished skeletons. A 1980s tax provision left reinforced-concrete frames standing exposed for decades before completion. Where a building was topped out long after its frame was poured, ask what the frame did in between.

Shared terraces, private liability. In a polykatoikia, an area under an owner's exclusive or special use, such as a private terrace, is normally that owner's repair responsibility under the building's regulation, even where the underlying defect traces back to the original developer. The economic effect is that you fund the CapEx first and pursue anyone else afterwards. So terrace waterproofing condition belongs in your acquisition budget, not on a list of things the building will handle, and the building regulation is a document to read before signature rather than after a leak. If a transaction turns on a terrace-liability question, have a Greek lawyer check current precedent on responsibility allocation for building defects.

Law 4495/2017 sorts unpermitted structures into five categories by severity [11], from pre-1975 residential structures carrying a permanent exemption and a flat €250 fee, up to major excess beyond 40% of footprint or 20% of height. Only violations predating 28 July 2011 qualify at all. Categories 1 to 4 currently run to 31 March 2028 [12]. Treat that date as current rather than fixed: it is the third extension, after November 2019, end of 2025, and 31 March 2026 [13]. Category 5 closed on 30 September 2020, and the filing system now rejects submissions after that date, subject to narrow exceptions under Article 128 of Law 4759/2020 [14]. Before signature, ask which category any documented deviation falls into, who is paying to close it, and whether the deadline has moved again since this article was published.

Sitting on top of the physical legacy is a digital one. The Building ID (Ηλεκτρονική Ταυτότητα Κτιρίου) is the certified compliance file proving a building matches its permits. Its deadline has also been extended, most recently to 1 February 2028 for Category I buildings [12]. Separately, Article 217 of Law 5222/2025 created MIDA, the Property Ownership and Management Registry operated by the tax authority, which pulls together each property's description, real rights, actual use, and management into one record [15]. The platform is being phased in rather than fully live, and penalties attach to property uses beginning 1 November 2026, a date the tax authority can move by decision [16].

The action does not depend on those dates. Assemble the file for the property before you sign: contract, registration certificate or cadastral entry, E9, ATAK, KAEK, topographic survey, building permit and drawings, any unpermitted-structure declarations, Building ID, lease, and electricity supply number. Then check four fields against each other: location, surface area, right, and use [16]. A mismatch you find at your desk is a negotiating point. The same mismatch found by an automated cross-reference is a file with your name on it.

8. Where this leaves an asset manager

Whether you are comparing Athens to Toulouse, Toronto, or Tampa, the absence of a French-style décennale does not make Greek construction riskier in the abstract. It means the risk that would sit with an insurer elsewhere sits, by default, with you, unless you move it by contract before signature. Quebec aside, that is closer to the international norm than most investors assume.

Five points to carry forward:

1. Acceptance under Article 692 is a legal event, not a formality. A documented walkthrough with dated, photographed, individually referenced reserves is what stands between you and the end of your recourse.
2. The apparent-versus-latent line is drawn by method, not by luck. A tap test, a plug-in tester, and a running climate unit move defects from one side of it to the other.
3. Insurance-style protection has to be negotiated deliberately, in Greece and, for renovation work, in most of North America too. Retention agreed at signature costs nothing. Retention improvised at delivery costs a relationship.
4. Article 702's wage exposure is procedural. Verify payroll and social-security certificates before each payment tranche.
5. If you come from a jurisdiction with more automatic protection, it does not travel with you. The habits it encouraged, documentation, holdbacks, verified contractor solvency, are worth bringing anyway. You now have the questions to ask before signature and the checks to run before acceptance. If you are signing a renovation contract in the next few months, the highest-value line you can still add is the retention percentage, and asking for it costs you nothing.

Owners who would rather have the delivery day run for them, with the reserve register, the photographic evidence and the withholding recommendation produced on the spot, should send the contract and the agreed scope before the handover date is fixed, not after. Everyone else should run it themselves, because the alternative is not running it.

Understand the concrete.

References

1. Global Arbitration Review, Construction Arbitration: Greece, Know-How chapter, globalarbitrationreview.com. Sets out the effect of acceptance and approval under GCC Article 692, the two surviving exceptions, and who may validly carry out the inspection.
2. Greek Civil Code (Αστικός Κώδικας), Articles 330 to 332 on limitation of liability and Article 914 on tort. Consolidated text via Lawspot.
3. Kyriakides Georgopoulos Law Firm (Elisabeth Eleftheriades and Kimon Tsakiris), "Greece", chapter 14 in The International Comparative Legal Guide to: Construction & Engineering Law 2016, 3rd edition, Global Legal Group, July 2016. Covers the contract-for-work regime at GCC Articles 681 to 702 and its largely non-mandatory character, the ten-year and six-month limitation periods for defect claims, retention and guarantees as permitted derogations from Article 694, the position of a subsequent owner after approval of the works, and the unenforceability of terms contrary to Article 702.
4. Tarion. "Coverage and coverage limits after you move in" and "Claim forms and timelines." tarion.com, accessed August 2026. Sets out the 1, 2, and 7 year coverage windows and what each protects.
5. Colorado Revised Statutes § 13-80-104. Six-year statute of repose running from substantial completion, extendable to eight years under § 13-80-104(2).
6. Revised Code of Washington § 4.16.310. Claims arising from construction, alteration, repair, design, planning, survey or engineering of improvements upon real property must accrue within six years of substantial completion, or within six years of termination of the services listed in RCW 4.16.300, whichever is later.
7. 42 Pa.C.S. § 5536. Twelve-year statute of repose from completion, barring claims regardless of when the defect was discovered.
8. Pennsylvania General Assembly, 2025 to 2026 session, co-sponsorship memorandum proposing reduction of the construction statute of repose from twelve years to six.
9. Law 2251/1994 on consumer protection, as amended, most recently by Laws 5019/2023, 5039/2023, 5111/2024, 5164/2024 and 5170/2025. See ICLG, Product Liability Laws and Regulations 2026: Greece, iclg.com.
10. Law 2251/1994, Article 6, transposing Directive 85/374/EEC. Article 6(1) establishes the producer's strict liability; Article 6(13) sets the three-year limitation from knowledge of the damage, the defect and the identity of the producer, with rights extinguished ten years after the product was placed on the market.
11. Law 4495/2017, Article 96, on categories of unpermitted structures and changes of use. Consolidated text via Lawspot.
12. Ministry of Environment and Energy amendment extending the inclusion deadline for Categories 1 to 4 of Article 96 of Law 4495/2017, for violations predating 28 July 2011, to 31 March 2028, and the Building ID deadline for Category I buildings to 1 February 2028. Reported in To Vima, 1 February 2026.
13. Workenter and Proson, January 2026, on the sequence of extensions: originally November 2019, then end of 2025, then 31 March 2026, now 31 March 2028.
14. Technical Chamber of Greece, Peloponnese Section, consolidated question-and-answer document on Law 4495/2017, April 2022, recording that the system rejects Category 5 declarations submitted after 30 September 2020 other than in cases falling under Article 128 of Law 4759/2020. See also B2Green on subsequent requests to reopen the category.
15. Law 5222/2025, "National Customs Code and other provisions", ΦΕΚ Α' 134 of 28 July 2025, Article 217, inserting Article 15B into the Code of Tax Procedure (Law 5104/2024) and establishing the Property Ownership and Management Registry (MIDA) at the Independent Authority for Public Revenue. Subsequently codified with Law 5313/2026, so confirm the current wording before relying on it.
16. B2Green, "MIDA: procedure, penalties and the necessary technical check," 2026. Sets out the document file per property and the four fields to verify (location, surface, right, use), and notes penalties applying to uses beginning 1 November 2026, movable by decision of the AADE Governor.

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Scope note: Arnaud Zerdab and Klehomerie are not certified civil engineers or licensed architects, hold no engineering seal, and assume no legally binding structural liability. Where a task requires the signature of a licensed professional, Klehomerie's role is Technical Project Management: coordinating the right certified local professionals to get the document issued correctly. Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice. Owners structuring a transaction in Greece, Quebec, or elsewhere should confirm current provisions with a licensed lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction. The delivery inspection referenced in section 4 is reproduced with identifying details removed.