Prices continue to sink

As time passes by and prospects of economic recovery seem unlikely, property owners and investors within the office sector are offering lower prices. Although there are prices for the various types of properties are different, rents continue to decline in all four largest cities in Bulgaria.
While companies downsize and office demand remains exuberant, vacancy levels in Sofia have become higher reaching double digit figures for the first time in years. Property owners should be more aggressive, if they wish to let their properties – the rent of a building near Business Park Sofia has dropped down from €14 to €10 per sq m. The rents of some of the few offices developed last year in the city center have declined from €25-28 per sq m to €18 per sq m. 
But demand has not completely disappeared. Apart from letting units to two major companies (BTC and VMWare), Tishman International has managed to let 4,300 sq m of warehouse units and offices in Sofia Airport Center to companies like Honeywell и Naturprodukt.
In the cities of Varna, Plovdiv and Burgas property owners should remind themselves that these markets are quite different from the one in Sofia. Here, offices with central locations can be rented for €6-8 per sq m per month – e.g. you can rent a 100-sq m unit in the center of Plovdiv for € 6 per sq m per month or a 45-sq m unit in an eleven –storey building on Varna’s Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd.
Sale prices, too, have gone back to former figures, although certain places, like the city center in Sofia, offer 150 –sq m flats formerly used as offices for € 5,700 per sq. m. However, the remaining amount of offers concerning residential and administrative properties rarely exceeds € 2,500 per sq m. With the exception of a building located on Bulgaria Blvd., prices of office units reach € 1,500 outside Sofia’s city center and hardly exceed this amount in central districts in other big cities.
In the city of Burgas you can purchase a new 72- sq m office located in a new business center near the Burgas Free University for just € 850 per sq m. In Plovdiv, a 77-sq m unit located near International Plovdiv Fair will cost you € 800 per sq m.