Many investors buying Property overseas will not know about local tax & registration charges in Central & Eastern Europe. This is why we recommend our investors to use our preferred partners in each of the countries we have promoted developments in.

Translating forms to fill out can be difficult if you don't know the local language and where to send them. In Bulgaria, we offer the following services on registering your new property through our own Management Company.

Property & Garbage Tax:

There are two local property rates i.e. property tax and garbage tax. We charge 75 Euros (Ex-VAT) per property for garbage and property tax registration. All property in Bulgaria needs to be registered for garbage tax and property tax within 2 months of issuing the Habitation Certificate (Act 16, otherwise heavy fines and compound interest charges are imposed. Annual payment of Property & Garbage tax once registered is a service that we include thereafter in the monthly management fee.

For more information on this service, email here

Utility registration:

As above, we again charge a 75 Euros (Ex-VAT) administration fee for each separate utility account that is registered. Many new/off-plan properties are handed over from developers without registering the utility accounts to individual owners. Our partners have to coordinate with the utility company & provide access to their inspector to install/tag the meter. A member of staff has to wait on-site to administer this phase of the process. Our partners also have to send a member of staff to the relevant administrative offices to make all the necessary applications to ensure that a unique customer number is issued in the owner's name for billing purposes; this is sadly a highly bureaucratised procedure.
For both the above registration services we would need a Power of Attorney (POA). If the POA is sent from UK it needs to be apostilised so that our partners can represent the owner as their proxy. Better still is to notarise a POA in Bulgaria, however of course this is subject to the willingness and availability of each individual client to commit to the trip over to the country.

For more information on this service, email here

If you have your property management team in place, we would strongly recommend getting in touch with them. Not all Management Companies will tell you about charges and this could lead to investors owing substantial amounts for unpaid taxes with compounded interest and late payment fines. The same applies for utility bills especially 'TOPLOFIKATZIA' (central heating) with one owner owing more than 7,000 Leva in unpaid bills after leaving the property unmanaged!

For more information on using Property Secrets partnered Management Company in Sofia, email us here and we'll send you costs over for snagging, fitting out, tenant find & management as well as giving you further information on the services we provide.