Preparing for our first trip.

So the first thing we did was start searching the internet for properties in Bulagria. We had been told the best way to buy property was to just go out there and start speaking to locals - this way you would get the best deal. This was exactly what we would do when we had the money and time to go out there, but for now we wanted to get an idea of what you could get for your money. Of course we don't speak any Bulgarian (yet) so we were limited to UK run estate agents. We are still not sure if this is better or worse than Bulgarian run estate agents but at least we could read them. The three main sites I looked at were Rightmove, Cheap-Bulgarian-Houses and Bulgarian Properties.

 

We had decided we wanted to look in the Blagoevgrad Province as we had driven through here and thought it was absolutely stunning. It is also close to Sofia and en-route to Greece with a very good road - an excellent location for our business. But of course this is all taken into account which means that property prices were a just out of our reach. So we started looking else where. I found that there seemed to be certain locations that were cheaper (North - near the Danube, around Veliko Tarnovo, around Yambol etc) but none of these areas appealed to us. In the end we just decided to look in South Central Bulgaria and hope for the best.

 

We have a rough budget of 15000 GBP and want a house with minimum of one acre of land. From looking online we began to realise this was very reasonable.

 

Once we had saved enough money we booked a weeks holiday to Bulgaria with a hire car. We wanted just to look around and try and find an area we liked. In the end I decided to organise a few viewings through the internet so we could see what kind of state these properties were in and see how they compared in real life to the photos on the website. We organised two days with Cheap-Bulgarian-Houses and one day with Brits2Bulgaria (found via Rightmove website). After thinking more about it we decided that it would be much easier to do everything through an estate agent, if possible, as we currently have neither the time nor money to hang out in Bulgaria for months talking to mayors of villages.

 

Then suddenly it was early June already and were off to Sofia to meet with estate agents, like two real grown-ups, not really knowing what to expect.