by Karim J A Brathwaite

Recently Bulgaria has become one of the most prominent places to join the European trend of middle class holiday investing largely fuelled by British, Irish and American investors. Property; very cheap and surprisingly profitable property is at the top of the shopping list for many lay families and individuals looking to enjoy 'the good life' when schedules permit. Bulgaria has proven through its tourist and property industry to be worthy of its recent favour.

One of the frequent questions is: why Bulgaria? The answer to those who have invested before is all in the history of the numbers. While Bulgaria doesn't have a long history in the property market, the budding market is spawning a lot of happy investors harvesting their rewards and forging a long term trend, the beginning of which yields the answer to the 'why' in investigating the 'when'. It was in 2001 and 2002 that Bulgaria made public their efforts to come up to par with western nations through substantial efforts to transform the nation from a defunct, all but nameless former soviet satellite to a contributing and valued member of the European and International communities. Bulgaria set off to accomplish this by working to qualify for involvement in international organizations such as joining NATO early in 2004 and signing the European Union Accession treaty during the Luxembourg Presidency of 2005. It was arguably these political steps that displayed to Europeans and the world that Bulgaria was open and on the road to stability, ready for investments in some of the cheapest and most profitable properties available in Europe, with diverse areas from beach front apartments and villas to ski resorts and mountainside chalets and bungalows lining the highest European peaks east of the Alps. With property prices incontestably lower than the competing western nations and a local service industry that makes the cost of living just as negligible, foreigners have a lot to gain when purchasing in Bulgaria, not the least of which is improving their quality of life without going above and beyond the credit limits. For example - it's possible for a middle class British investor to purchase a property in Bulgaria and use home media development services to have a partially automated and fully media accessible home with LCD screens and audio in every room without spending more than GBP30-40k on the entire endeavour. Services like HomeMediaBg (http://www.homemediabg.com) and scores more make these wonders into a possible standard for many.

Between the years 2001 and 2005 Bulgaria's property market has maintained an average growth of 20-30% on property value appreciation annually. Furthermore, above average appreciation occurs annually in the tourist regions where the idea of owning a holiday apartment or villa on the Black Sea beaches or a chalet in the popular ski resorts has maintained substantial appeal to more than just a few working class property seekers. In that same period, many Bulgarians profited from the markets as well with a number of shrewd, business-minded people seeing an opportunity to capitalize in the spirit of new-found capitalism, they quickly established themselves in the path of the deluge. Bulgaria's property market went from accommodating 2 major agents in 2001 to spawning approximately 3,000 by the year 2005.

In Bulgaria's present market, future, former and current investors share a common curiosity: 'What lays ahead for a property market that has been surpassing expectations for four (4) years?' It's a question that even the thriving and bold Bulgarian property agents are hesitant to broach. No one can claim to know how far the market will rise before a doomsday-like market correction is required to normalize prices and remedy artificial inflation. To understand the hesitance to address the concern and ignorance that most buyers have about the future state of the Bulgarian property market, it's necessary to understand the driving force behind the evolving market trend.