Living and working in Bulgaria in our sphere of business, we often meet foreigners who have come to the country to buy real estate and have heard a fair amount of horror stories. The truth of the matter is that you don’t need a licence to operate as an estate agency in this country and with the current boom there are a lot of people out there looking to make a quick buck. The market is almost totally unregulated and it is crucial that you work with reputable companies.

Some of the pitfalls:

If you don’t speak Bulgarian you are totally dependent on your agent and can rarely communicate directly with the seller. We have been told of cases where representatives from a large company that appeals to Brits via a popular website took advantage of both the buyer and seller’s inability to understand one another’s language. The seller was asking for 15 Euro per square metre and the buyer was being told the price was 40 Euro per square metre. What’s worse is that both sides were being ripped off because the seller would still only get 15 Euro per square metre and the agent would pocket the difference (along with is commission).

Not all notaries are honest and they are often in the game along with the agent so you cannot always rely on them pointing out an obvious crook to you, although that is the reason the Bulgarian law requires all the transactions to be verified by a notary. One of the positive stories we heard about a notary was the one who alerted a Brit to the fact that he was about to pay a ridiculously high price for a property and said Brit cancelled the deal on the spot. He ended up fleeing in fear from his agent who was after him in a BMW with blacked-out windows and also ended up losing his 10% deposit.

There is also a loophole in the law that means that you could be conned by unscrupulous sellers. When the search for good root to title is carried out in the Land Register, there are 3 to 5 blank days, immediately before the search, for which your attorney will not be able to give you any data – i.e. there is a possibility that the owner of the estate might have put a lien on it, etc. It is not a frequent occurrence and to prevent it happening the deal can be guaranteed by an escrow account set up either by the notary or by a bank.     

If you are buying from abroad do some thorough research on the many sites available – take a look at the photos of houses, get a good idea of price ranges and check out where is a good place to buy. You can also ‘chat’ with the many foreigners who have already been through this experience both on The Sofia Echo ‘Forum’ and on others. We certainly do not recommend buying blind, as some sites offer.