Bulgaria real estate prices rose 6 to 8% in 2017 – agency
Property prices across Bulgaria rose steadily from six to eight per cent in 2017, Kaloyan Bogdanov, marketing manager of real estate agency Address, said in an interview with public broadcaster Bulgarian National Television.
“Growth is reported in large cities, while in small towns it is much lower,” he said. Because of the fall in interest rates on loans, property demand had increased, Bogdanov said.
He said that interest rates on loans were at an “historical low level”. At the same time, salaries in Bulgaria were increasing.
The trend for years had been interest in moving to Bulgaria’s large cities.
Rental fees were increasing, especially in places that had outsourcing and IT companies, according to Bogdanov.
The increase in prices was also partly due to the low-cost airlines’ direct flights to the large cities in Bulgaria, he said.
Property prices in Varna had been increasing for the past three years, at an average of about five per cent a year, according to the National Statistical Institute. The city, the largest on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, is among the five in the country where there had been an increase in finalised deals. Most buyers were Bulgarians, including those who had lived abroad and had decided to come home.
Foreigners, mostly Russians and British people, were also interested in buying apartments in Varna.
Families prefer to buy newly-built accommodation rather than in the old apartment blocks.
Especially in the case of Varna, there was interest in property in all areas of the city.
“Investors are mostly interested in one- and two-bedroom apartments – two or three-rooms,” Dobromir Ganev of the National Real Estate Association told BNT.
According to Ganev, price was the principal consideration in buying a property. In Varna, prices in the centre of the city were about double those in the outlying residential areas. Prices ranged from 400 euro in the outer areas to 1500 euro a sq m in the central part of the city.
(Photo, of the area of the Roman Thermae in Varna: Svilen Enev)
