Overseas Property: Black Sea bonanza Bulgaria’s coastline is attracting foreign property investors like bees to honey. PETER CONRADI does the maths, wondering if they’ll profit in the longer term
::nobreak::It begins on the plane from Britain: pick up a copy of the in-flight magazine of Bulgaria Air, and almost every other page carries an ad for the latest Black Sea apartment complex, each apparently more glittering, splendid and — above all — profitable than the last.
Pitch up in Sunny Beach, the brash heart of the coast, and the streets are full of estate agents peddling luxury flats and seaside villas. People go on holiday here, it seems, as much to snap up property bargains as to lie on the sand.
“There must be 40 or 50 agents here now, but very few of them have any experience or know what they are doing,” says Mihail Chobanov, 30, co-founder of Bulgarian Properties, one of the country’s best established agents, whose little office in the resort is already surrounded by several clones. “You get one kiosk selling clothes, the next one selling hamburgers and the one in the middle selling property.”
The Bulgarian property market is booming. Old-style communist resorts that were once the summer playground of Russian, Czech and Polish workers are being demolished and replaced by a Balkan version of the Costa del Sol. In scenes familiar from the Spain of the 1970s and 1980s, virgin coast is filling rapidly with apartment blocks and prices are climbing steadily. The price of land, meanwhile, is going through the roof: plots five or 10 miles inland are being snapped up even if the sea views are so distant that you need a telescope
