Globally, the investments in business properties have increased by 14% in 2011 in comparison with 2010. The highest growth was in North America – 52%, followed by Europe and the Middle East – 17%. In Central and Eastern Europe, these investments have reached 19 billion Euros in 2011, which is a growth of 76% in comparison with 2010. This is 68% of the volume of their volume during the property boom years.
In 2011 the investments in business properties in Bulgaria have increased sharply in comparison with 2010. In 2010 they were 20 million Euros, while in 2011 they reached 198 million Euros, which has put the country in the first place regarding this type of investment. In the second place is Slovakia with an annual increase of 534%, followed by the Czech Republic with 366%, South Africa with 269% and Switzerland with 216%. However, the annual yield in Bulgaria has not changed – for office spaces it is about 9,5%, for shops – 9% and for industrial space it is 12%.

Jessie Hewitson, The Observer

Back in 2006, Andrew and Pat Pryce decided to buy an investment property in Bulgaria. With retirement looming, they were hoping for rental income to supplement their pension, and a flat they could eventually sell on at a profit. When they read on the internet about the Mechi Chal mountain lodge in Pamporovo, advertised by overseas property agent Someplace Else as “the most exclusive in Bulgaria’s booming ski resorts” and offering a guaranteed rental yield of 7% a year for the first three years, they put down a deposit of £19,485.

It was a year later, in 2007, that they had the first inkling that something might be wrong. No one was asking them for more money, and there seemed to be no evidence that building was taking place. By 2008, they were so concerned with the lack of progress that they went to Bulgaria and drove around Pamporovo to investigate for themselves.

“We couldn’t see any sign of the development,” says Andrew. “On a second visit we attempted to locate the agency’s Bulgarian office in Plovdiv, but found it inhabited by another company.”

Having lost faith that the development would ever be built, the Pryces asked for their deposit to be returned. They say Someplace Else agreed to this more than a year ago but, despite being promised the money on three occasions, they have received only £2,000. They have now consulted a lawyer.

The Pryces are not alone. Since January 2008, the Association of International Property Professionals (AIPP) – a voluntary organisation with 376 members – has received 116 formal complaints from buyers unhappy about purchases abroad.

The number of people who have lost money in projects around the world is likely to be far higher than most realise, partly because nobody is keeping a record, and partly because those who have lost money are too embarrassed – and upset – to talk about it.

John Howell, senior partner in the International Law Partnership, specialising in overseas property purchases, estimates that 20% of those who have bought off-plan in the past two years are likely to run into “significant difficulty”. According to AIPP estimates, in 2007 193,600 of us bought property in the 10 countries most favoured by British buyers. This means more than 38,000 may be in hot water from just a single year’s overseas property purchases – and some may not even realise it yet.

The collapse of Churchill Properties Overseas alone meant about 340 investors, mainly British and Irish, lost deposits worth an estimated £4m. The company, which sold property in Estonia, Cape Verde and Goa, went into “voluntary liquidation” last summer.

Out of pocket

Another high-profile company, Bulgarian Dreams, closed at the end of 2008 and is currently being investigated by the City of London Police economic crime department. It is impossible to know exactly how many of its investors – who have bought in more than 40 developments in the eastern European country – have been left out of pocket.

Some of the estimated 100-150 investors who, like the Pryces, bought off-plan apartments in the Mechi Chal lodge, are leaving desperate posts on property forums and seeking legal action to get their money back.

Ben Mason, a partner of Someplace Else, says the delays have been caused by the local water authority rescinding permission it had previously granted. He is hoping to get it reinstated. “Providing this happens in the next two months, we can get the first phase finished by December this year and the second phase completed by December next year,” he says.

Mason admits the development is hard to find, but claims that the foundations are in place for phase one, many of the houses have been built off-site and when they do get water permission, the Bulgarian office will reopen.

As for the Pryces’ deposit, he says: “Due to the current economic climate, it has taken us longer than we expected to make this refund from the UK … however, there is no question of the Pryces not receiving the balance of their deposit, with interest, over the next few weeks.”

Howell notes that the developers in trouble are not typically local but British would-be Donald Trumps, and new to the game. “Many of these developers probably started off with good intentions but soon got in over their heads,” he says. “Whether it was fraud or bad economic times is a moot point, frankly, because the end result is the same: people lose money.”

Bad lands

Derek Smythe (not his real name) is more than aware of his predicament, and resigned to losing the £30,000 he invested in 2006 into a company that promised to buy land in Montenegro, get planning permission, build and sell on.

“Since investing the money, I’ve had virtually no communication from the directors [both British],” he says. “There’s no evidence that the money was used to purchase any land at all – I have absolutely no idea what happened to it. It’s been pretty miserable – and the worst thing is, it’s all my fault as I didn’t ask enough questions.”

The sums of money being lost are vast: Howell recently met 70 people, mainly Britons, who had sunk an average of €80,000 (£70,000) into a troubled development in Bulgaria.

He also has clients who regret buying in Dubai. “The problem is that all the major building companies belong to the royal family, and you won’t find a lawyer who will sue.”

The range of people losing money this way spans class, gender and age: young, old, working class, middle class, the gullible, the naive and the greedy are all suffering alike.

“I’ve got clients who are working-class people who invested the £20,000 equity they had in their home, and high-flying professionals who frankly ought to have known better,” says Howell, adding that one client who got stung was a partner in a chartered accountancy firm.

Many of these problems would not have happened if the investors had sought the advice of a good lawyer – something that many of the people interviewed for this article bitterly regret not doing.

According to some analysts the property market in Bulgaria will reach the bottom by the end of this year. The professionals are of the opinion that it is more important how the Bulgarian property market will start moving rather than when. It seems that the Bulgarian government does not have priorities and the economic recovery will be long and difficult. Around the world the property markets will recover with a different speed and at different times. The huge property markets in the USA and the UK give clear signs to the investors that the prices have become attractive and the expectations are that by the middle of the year there will be an increase in the number of purchases.
Developers operating in Bulgaria have raised their voices to request a more open business environment during the recession and clearer rules concerning their relationship with the state. They outline as a serious problem the behaviour of the electricity, water and heating suppliers which are huge monopolies. The suppliers do not invest in infrastructure but wait for the developers to build it and then buy this infrastructure from them, nobody knows when and how. The developers request that the state regulates these relations.

For the first time in four years there are clear signs that the interest towards holiday homes in Bulgaria has decreased. The major buyers on this market – the Irish and the English – have stopped buying. The estate agents now joke that the result of this crisis is exactly what the greens have been striving to achieve – there is no construction in the resorts whatsoever.

According to the analysts, the slump has come as a natural result of the wish of the developers to constantly increase the number of foreign buyers, taking advantage of the low prices. At the moment there are no buyers at all and many developers sell their properties well below their value. Those few developers who have free cash despite the recession do not want to invest in the overdeveloped Black Sea and mountain resorts. There the property prices have dropped so much that a studio costs as much as a new middle class car. Despite this, there are no buyers. The supply on the holiday property market is 80% higher than the demand. There are thousands of sellers and no buyers. There is no secondary market due to the low rental income.

40 000 Euros can buy you a furnished one bedroom apartment in Sunny Beach. Most buyers receive not only discounts but also fitted kitchens, furniture or at least laminated floor.

In Bansko the situation looks similar. A one bedroom apartment of 80 sq m, situated close to the gondola lift costs 38 000 Euros. Further away from the lift in the direction of the central parts of the town price fall and for 30 000 Euros investors can buy an apartment of 64 sq m. Completed furnished apartments sell for about 600 Euros per sq m.

Although the holiday homes market has reached new lows, the analysts believe that in long term there will be good prospects for its development. The recession itself has lead to to preservation of the nature and this will eventually attract new buyers and tourists. On the other hand the recession has brought new lower prices of materials and labour. Many companies which got involved in construction because of the high profits are now going bankrupt. The developers are becoming more careful and there are expectations that the new projects will be of much better quality and with better location.

Regardless of the fact that the British and Irish buyers have lost interest towards the Bulgarian market, the analysts expect that soon Russians, Poles and Scandinavians will start buying in great numbers in Bulgaria. However, they look for different products and it seems that what has been built for the British buyers will not satisfy them. The holiday apartment or house will be less important than the environment, the peace and quiet, and the services on offer.

Despite the financial and economic crisis, the market of agricultural land will stay relatively active in 2009 but the prices will fall, according to the Bulgarian Deputy Agricultural Minister Svetla Bachvarova. In her annual analysis of the agricultural land market she said that there has been an increase of more than 21% of the market in comparison with 2007. The average price of the deals in the last year has been 312 levs per 1000 sq m, according to the System for Agricultural Market Information. This is an increase of almost 33% of the market values in comparison with 2008. The prediction for this year is that they will fall to 280-300 levs per 1000 sq m. The differences in the prices for the different regions of the country remain. The lowest prices are in the area of Lovech and Pernik, relatively 201 lv per 1000 sq m and 140 lv per 1000 sq m. The highest prices are in Dobrich – 546 levs per 1000 sq m.
In 2008 for the second consecutive year the highest number of purchases of land took place in the Northern Central area.
There is a decrease in the renting of agricultural land. This was due to the fact that in 2008 and 2007 a larger part of the tenants have signed long-term contracts for more than four years with the land owners.
The regulation of agricultural land has decreased in the last year by 20% in comparison with 2007. The reason is the decreased interest for investment in tourism.
In 2009 it is expected that the area of the land for growing agricultural production will stay the same and only the land used for growing wheat will increase by 10%.

The situation on the Bulgarian property market in the beginning of 2009 remains similar to the one in the end of 2008. There are no deals, the number of the properties for sale increase, while serious buyers take their time before they commit themselves to a purchase. The new features are – perks offered by the developers, estate agencies who do not take commissions and the birth of a new type of property in the property web sites – “property with falling prices”. Only on 3 and 4 of January 2009 the number of the properties with falling prices increased to fifteen. In this category the decrease of the prices of  houses beats all other properties  -  15 – 20%. Plots of land are in the second place, closely followed by offices and garages.  House prices fall everywhere – from Sofia to small towns like Smolyan. Even prestigious locations in the centre of Sofia can not prevent prices from falling.  The price of a house in Dondukov Boulevard in Sofia which has been for sale for some time has dropped by 40% to 450 000 Euros. It is difficult to say whether this will attract new buyers. One thing is certain, the Bulgarian property market has entered a period at the end of which the prices of properties will be very different from the price of the last two years.

The developers are the ones who experience the harshest problems. This is the reason why they look for solutions in all possible ways. Apart from dropping the prices, they have started to lease the apartments built by them to buyers with a minimal interest. Their return has been delayed by 15 years in some cases, thus preventing them from making new investments. Other bonuses include fitted kitchens costing up to 3000 lv and in the cases of two-bedroom apartments complete furnishing plus one or two parking lots. Some developers add to this a plasma TV. However, the analysts do not believe that these perks will do the trick and attract more customers. All these bonuses can not solve the problems of the buyers in getting a mortgage.

There won’t be any skyscrapers in the near future in Sofia. The fear of bankruptcy put on hold all projects Manhattan style in the Bulgarian capital. Some of the projects for new shopping centres have also been stopped indefinitely. Many of the investors contemplate selling their plots of land rather than pushing ahead with their plans. Others decided to make completely new projects. They think that it is safer to have their money in cash which will give them the opportunity to buy bigger plots of land in two years time.

Due to the unpredictability of the property market at the moment, nobody expects the investors to pay the fee for planning permission for the first skyscraper in Sofia, despite the fact that ten companies have expressed interest in the project. Nobody can predict the fate of the first 90 m high skyscraper in Sofia which had to be built behind the central railway station. The project is only at the planning stage and the developers have not submitted the documentation in the municipality.

Some of the investors who started building office buildings combined with apartments, now would like to change their plans because of the falling prices of apartments.

“At the moment there are several projects approved by the municipality but they have not been launched yet by the developers. Everybody waits to see which way things will go. In March of next year the first blows will come. Then we shall see who will sell and who has the real intention to build”,

said Petar Dikov, the Chief Architect of Sofia. A clear example is the shopping mall on the junction of Todor Kableshkov Blvd and Bulgaria Blvd which for the second consecutive year has not even reached the ground level stage. A Lithuanian investment company has put on hold for an indefinite period their 500 million Euro project called Sofia Acropolis. The initial plans were to build a 800 000 sq. m. of shopping and entertainment area.

However, having in mind the atrocious practice of the last years to give planning permissions virtually for any building anywhere, if the uncontrolled construction stops, there are expectations that this might be to the benefit of Sofia.

The turnover of the largest Bulgarian construction companies in 2007 was 2.7 billion levs according to the Builders’ Chamber in Bulgaria (KSB) which announced the annual statistics on the eve of the day of the builders, St Dimitre’s Day. More than 2400 Bulgarian construction companies have provided information for these statistics.

The largest construction company in Bulgaria is Glavbolgarstroy AD with a turnover reaching 228.9 million levs. Roads Holding is in the second place with 151.7 million levs. It seems unlikely a company building roads to take the first place, as there are no infrastructure projects for the time being.

The growth of the construction industry according to its chamber demonstrated a growth of 16% per annum but this year there will be a slow down. This recession has been expressed in the halting of investment projects and of planning permissions. If the European funding has not been stopped, the construction industry would have maintained its growth.

The sales of properties have decreased twice in the first three months of 2009 in comparison with the same period in 2007. The main reason is the shrinking of the market. The investments in the property market are much less than in previous years.

In order to attract clients the construction companies now tend to building longer – up to 3 years. At the same time they  accept smaller instalments during the construction and a bigger final instalment when the project is ready. It is difficult to make predictions at the moment but for the time being there are no significant changes in the cities.

Office and retail rents fall and will keep falling in the next two years according to Raiffeisen Property. In short term the office space on offer will outnumber the demand. The same tendency is valid for retail space, as only in the next 2.5 years it is expected that the retail space will increase eight times.

Meanwhile the interest of investors is expected to decrease due to the world crisis which has hit the property market. As result the secondary market will become rather active.  Those who bought property as investment will rush to sell it. The demand will be focused mainly in the cities. The prices of high quality residential property will rise in expensive city areas.

In the mountain and sea resorts there are too many properties on offer. In the end of 2007 there were more than 80 000 newly built properties there, while currently there is demand for about 65% of them.

Burgas Municipality has received the BBB credit rating. The general evaluation has shown that the investment risk in Burgas is and it is a good place to invest. The financial audit of the municipality and the following credit analysis has outlined an income increase of 95%, low unemployment and increase of the tax income.

According to professor Minasian, it is likely that the Bulgarian economy might suffer a mini-recession in 2009 similar to the one in the much bigger economies, but in a much smaller scale.  There are investments in the Bulgarian economy and they lead to an increase of the total demand, however, the increase of the GDP is not that fast the levels remain modest. The only logical conclusion is that the investments do not generate the necessary economic growth as they are not in production but in properties.

Despite the new Law for the Black Sea Shore which came into effect in January of this year, the developers have found a way to continue building right on sea shore. They call their buildings apartment complexes instead of hotels. However, because of the new restrictions for the height of hotels on the shore and for their size – the height of a hotel should not exceeding 7.5 metres which in reality is two or three floors  – it is expected that investments in such hotels will not have a good return. The investors have switched to building villas and have ignored the warnings of the experts for a property slump.

The Vienna Institute For International Economic Studies (Wiener Institut fur Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche) forecasts a decrease in the foreign investment in Bulgaria in 2008. The reasons for this are the economic slow down in Europe and the instability of the world credit markets. In the last two years Bulgaria has attracted foreign investment exceeding 12 billion Euros with an annual increase of 2,48%. The forecasted decrease for South-East Europe is 17%. Apart from Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania and Hungary will be the worst hit.

The management of State Fund Agriculture leaves for Brussels to find out why the European Commission has put on hold 183 million levs from the SAPARD program for Bulgaria. One of the most common mistakes has been the fact that the applicants did not comply with the requirements of the program. Often farmers applying for subsidies for the purchase of equipment and animals gave 2 additional fictitious applications in order to present the fund with 3 offers, while at the same time the administration did not check the documents. Moreover, farmers made deals with importers of agricultural equipment who in order to attract business, provided each farmer with two fictitious applications on top of the real one.

Other malpractices have been revealed in the investment for village tourism. With the European money for small village hotels have been built a great number of enormous hotels in the resorts. For this reason only, Brussels has stopped about 8 million Euros for 10 projects.

It is expected that the Dimitar Tadarakov, the Executive Director of SF Agriculture and his deputy Vladimir Karamishev will resign.

The index of the producer prices for May 2008 showed an increase by 12.9% since May 2007, according to the National Statistics Institute.  For the same period the increase of the prices of consumer goods is 9.4% and of the investment products is 5.4%, while the highest increase is the one of energy – 24.8%. The inflation of the production on the domestic market is 13.6%, while on the international market it is 11.6%. According to the analysts, this comes to show that the market in Bulgaria is still not completely free, as local producers offer their production at competitive low prices abroad, while at the same they can compensate this by increasing their profit in Bulgaria.