Bulgaria began 2023 with the real estate market cooling down after last year’s spikes in price growth in the large cities, said Gergana Tenekedjieva, CEO of ADRES Real Estate. She presented the trends on the property market to the press on Thursday. The downward trend for the number of trades in the last two quarters of 2022 is a reason to expect prices to start coming down too, but when exactly this will happen is too early to say, the expert said.
The experience from the 2008 period shows that due to the nature of this market, a significant decline in transactions usually lasts for four years, while prices continue to decrease over a period of six years.
Housing prices are first likely to go down in the smaller cities.
According to the company data, the drop in the number of housing trades in the capital city Sofia is currently between 15 and 20% compared to last year.
Last year, the increase in prices from the year before was nearly 32% in Varna, 25% in Sofia, 17% in Burgas and Plovdiv.
An increase of 10% is now seen in the number of tenants compared to the end of 2022.
During times with high inflation, it may be a good idea for people with savings to consider buying but those with no savings will be better if they wait with their purchase, Tenekedjieva said.
The dynamics of the real estate market show that in the last twenty years Bulgarians’ incomes have increased six times, and so have the average house prices. The dynamique The only change in the last 30 years is related to a shift of buyers’ interest from properties in the centre of big cities to other developing or developed areas, Tenekedjieva said.
In 20 years, the average property prices in the country have risen about six times from EUR 200/sq meter to EUR 1,200/sq m, and in terms of the number of transactions from 2013 to 2022, the trend shows that they are more concentrated in the big cities of Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and Burgas, while becoming fewer in smaller towns in the last ten years.
A change is seen in the pattern of buying: buyers used to make a single deal in their lifetime andnow they have a deal over a period often years.
