The viewing goes well, and then the landlord asks for your tax number. Why the lease depends on it, what the providers want, and how to keep every record spelling your name the same way.
The flat is right, the light is good, and the conversation turns practical. Then the landlord asks for your AFM, and a straightforward rental suddenly has a prerequisite you had not planned for. It is not obstruction and it is not a personal test — it is how a Greek lease is put on the record.
Long-term rental agreements are declared electronically to the tax authority by the landlord, and that declaration identifies the tenant by tax number. Without it the lease cannot be filed properly, which is why an otherwise relaxed landlord will hold firm on this one point. It also explains why the question tends to arrive at exactly the moment you are keenest to sign.
It is worth being clear about what this number is. The AFM is a tax identification number. It is not a residence permit, it does not confer any right to live or work here, it is not the AMKA that governs social insurance and healthcare, and it proves nothing about your income. It identifies you to the tax administration. Anything else you have been told it does is somebody else's procedure being confused with this one.
Preparation is mostly documentary. Expect to need your passport, evidence of an address, and the appropriate forms, with the competent tax office determined by where you live or how you are represented. The trap peculiar to Greece is transliteration: your name will be rendered from Latin characters into Greek ones, and there is more than one defensible way to do that. Choose one version, check it on the first document you are issued, and insist on it thereafter. A tenant whose lease, tax record and electricity account carry three different spellings will spend a weekend fixing it.
Utilities follow the lease. Electricity is the anchor of the household paperwork here: the supply number attached to the property recurs in a surprising number of later procedures, so photograph a recent bill before you change anything into your name. Several municipal charges are collected through the electricity bill rather than separately, which is efficient once you know it and baffling when you do not. Water is handled by the local utility, and the arrangements differ between municipalities.
When you take over an account, ask the outgoing tenant or the landlord for the meter reading on the day and keep a photograph of it. Transfers of holder are routine but slow to correct if the opening reading is disputed, and disputes are much easier to win with a timestamped photo than with a recollection.
The habit that saves the most trouble is consistency. One spelling of your name, one date of birth format, one address written the same way on the lease, the utility contracts and the tax record. Where anything is unusual — a shared tenancy, a property owned through a company, a long absence abroad — confirm the current requirements through the official channels or with a Greek accountant, since procedures here are digitised and revised at a genuinely brisk pace.