Who writes this, and how it is checked

Ellen Hartnoll is a pen name. It is disclosed here rather than buried, and it is the first thing on this page for the same reason every figure on this site carries a date: you are being asked to rely on something, and you are entitled to know exactly what.

What that means, and what it does not

The name is a pen name. There is no photograph, no biography, no professional body, no roll number and no claim to a regulated profession anywhere on this site, because there is none to make.

We are not lawyers, advocates, licensed conveyancers, notaries, estate agents, surveyors or tax advisers. In England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland and Cyprus most of those are protected titles, and none of them applies here. Nothing on this site is legal advice. Before you commit money, instruct an independent lawyer who acts only for you in the country where the property is.

A fabricated credential on a page a reader may act on before wiring six figures would be worse than an anonymous one. Disclosing the pen name costs less than any invented biography would, and it leaves you able to judge the work on the only thing that can be judged: whether the sources are real, whether the dates are real, and whether the numbers match what the sources say.

What is not a pen name is the company. BSI OÜ is a private limited company incorporated in Estonia, its registration number is on the legal notice, and the Estonian commercial register is public and free to search. One click of that number tells you more about who is behind this site than any badge would.

The method

Five rules, and they are the whole of it.

A figure appears only with the instrument it came from and the date it was read. Not a summary of the instrument, not somebody else's blog post about the instrument, and not a figure carried over from a previous version of this page. Where a price is a provider's rather than an authority's, the provider is named in the same sentence as the price.

A limitation is recorded as a measured absence. "No published fee as at 26 August 2026" is a fact. "They are cagey about pricing" is an adjective, and it does not appear on this site.

Every substantive claim names its country, its institution and its instrument in the same sentence. If a sentence about Greece would survive swapping Greece for Portugal, it is not telling you anything and it does not ship. This is the rule a multi-country site fails first, and it is the one worth checking us against.

Everything is re-read every 90 days. Every fee, every rate and every statutory citation. When we re-read them we change something real before we move the date: a date bumped with no substantive change is a lie about freshness, and the site's build refuses a stale one.

We do not fill gaps. Where a source could not be reached, the page says so, names what was attempted and what it returned, and states nothing. That is why the Greek pages here are thinner on money than the Cypriot ones, and why the golden visa page contains no investment threshold.

What we sell, and to whom we are paid to be nice

Nothing, and nobody.

There is no product, no report, no checkout and no price for anything of ours. We run no searches, obtain no documents and check no properties. There is no partner network, no referral arrangement, no affiliate link and no introduction service, and there is no clause anywhere on this site reserving a right to create one later.

That is not modesty and it is not a business plan. It is the only reason a page here can be an independent account of the firms that do sell these services. A comparison written by somebody who is paid when you click is a different document, whatever it says about itself, and this site would rather be the other kind.

We are not in our own comparison table, and the site's build fails if the name appears in it.

When we are wrong

We will be. The correction policy is short.

Tell us at the address on the legal notice. Say which page, which sentence and what the correct position is, and if you have the source, send it.

If it is wrong we change it, we move the visible date on that page, and we say in the page what changed. A silent correction is a second error. If it is a matter of judgement rather than fact we will say that too, rather than pretending the question is settled.

What was actually read for this site

The full register lives in the repository behind this site as content/sources/cy.json and content/sources/gr.json, one entry per figure, each with its value, its unit, the instrument or page it came from, an absolute link and the date it was read. Every page's own sources block is generated from the same evidence.

The short version, as at 26 August 2026.

Cyprus answered. The Department of Lands and Surveys publishes its own fees on the pages where the applications are made, and its Fees and Charges schedule is a downloadable document. The Sale of Immovable Property (Specific Performance) Law 81(I)/2011 and the Immovable Property Law, Cap. 224 are both readable in full. So the Cypriot pages here carry statutory citations down to the subsection.

Greece mostly did not. On 26 August 2026 the Independent Authority for Public Revenue returned HTTP 403 on every path attempted, with and without a referer and with full browser headers. The national services portal returned HTTP 403. The Hellenic Cadastre returned HTTP 403. The Hellenic Parliament returned HTTP 403. The National Printing House redirected and its search paths returned errors. Enterprise Greece, the Greek state's own investment agency, publishes no golden-visa page. What was readable: the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum's own Golden Visa page in both languages, the Greek contact point's contribution to the European Land Registry Network, and gov.uk.

That imbalance is visible on the pages and it should be. It is also the reason one planned page was not built at all: a page whose whole subject was the sequenced money of a Greek purchase would have been made of numbers this site could not read, and it does not exist rather than existing badly.

Currency conversions use the European Central Bank euro reference rates for 26 August 2026, and they move. The euro figure is always the one the authority charges.

Where the author is, and why it is not stated

Deliberately not stated, and not because it is a secret.

BSI OÜ has no permanent establishment in Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Italy or France, and it must not create one. A publicly presented resident of a destination country, carrying a local credential, is a stronger signal of a permanent establishment than a foreign writer is, and it would change the company's tax position in a country where it does no business. So the author is not presented as resident in any of them, and the pages are written from outside.

Nothing follows from that about the quality of the reading. The statutes are public, the fee schedules are public, and the dates are printed beside the figures so that you can check both.

• Legal notice, with the company's registration details.
• Privacy notice, for what happens to an email address left here.
• Buying property in Cyprus and buying property in Greece are where the method above is actually applied.