Tips for Buying Bulgarian Property as a Foreign Investor
If you are thinking about buying Bulgarian property as a non-national, you need to understand the basics.
Buying Bulgarian property is easy, but you need to fit into one of two classifications of status to execute the transaction.
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1. Buying Bulgarian property as a private, over-seas buyer
A non-national can quite easily buy an apartment. There is nothing preventing you from purchasing this type of property as a private individual.
You simply contract to purchase as you would in the UK, recruit a reputable Bulgarian lawyer to ensure that the builder is of good standing, and hand over your deposit.
If the apartment is not yet built, there may be clauses such as stage payments in the contract. You will need to get these checked by a reputable Bulgarian lawyer.
2. Buying Bulgarian property as a Bulgarian Limited Company
If you are buying Bulgarian property in the form of land, or houses on land, then you need to set up a Limited Company.
The good news is that setting up a Bulgarian Limited Company is neither expensive nor difficult.
We found it much easier to start the legal process before we travelled to Bulgaria. This gave us time to read and digest the contracts to ensure we understood everything about becoming a Bulgarian Limited Company.
A bonus of this preparation was that we were able to build a great working relationship with our recommended lawyers before we entered the country.
This was hugely beneficial to us during that viewing trip.
To set up your Limited Company you will need:
- A good Bulgarian lawyer
- Signed copies of the legal contracts (preferably in English and Bulgarian)
- Approxiamately €600 Euros for the Lawyers fees
- An additional €2,600 which acts as a Government deposit
- A valid passport
- The proposed name of your Limited Company
When in Bulgaria you will need to take these documents to a Government appointed "Notary" to be counter-signed and stamped.
Notary charges appear to be discretionary upon the size of the contracts and whether any additional work has been performed by the Notary's team of office administrators. We found these charges to be very low (about £1 a document, from memory!)
* The Government deposit of €2,600 is to prove that you are solvent. This money can be used towards your first purchase immediately after your company has been approved in the Courts. This takes about 10 days from your lawyers receiving the signed/notarised contracts.
Carefully selecting a qualified Bulgarian lawyer is of the utmost importance when buying Bulgarian property. Our highly recommended Bulgarian lawyer is Nikolay Ivanov.