Price of Agricultural Land Up by 500%

Standart News, 25th June 2005

The rapid pace, at which the prices of real estate in Bulgaria is going up, has been also spotted by the Wall Street Journal broadsheet newspaper, which ranked Bulgaria at the top of the world's standings against this index. There are quite substantial grounds to think that this tendency will go on over the next few years. Moreover, this tendency has a strong foundation, not influenced by the inflation rate, and namely the deliberate undervaluation of the real estates in Bulgaria, which has been accumulated for years now, and the artificial equalization of the prices, inevitable under the conditions of globalization.

There is yet another key-factor for this tendency and this is the gradually increasing liquidity of the real estate market in the country. Considering the more and more drastic increase in the prices of real estates over the past two or three years, we can assume with quite a certainty that the satiation point is still a few years ahead. Of course, not all sectors of the Bulgarian real estate market are equally developed; neither will they develop at an equally fast pace in the future. The prices of real estates at the Bulgarian seaside are expected to slacken the pace of increase, whereas the investments in farmland are to give considerable opportunities for profit-making in the near future.

Over the past two or three years there has been a serious movement on the Bulgaria's farmland market. In the crop-growing, vine-growing or vegetables-growing regions of Bulgaria the price of farmland has increased from 500 levs/ha up to over 2,000/levs/ha. The restitution of land in real-term borders resulted in a startling 50-year delay, as regards the consolidation of farmland. This fact, added to the landowners' lack of interest in taking on farming business, is the basic reason for 35% of the farmland in the country to be left uncultivated. Having in mind the strict financial commitments of the EU towards the Bulgarian agriculture and the commitment of the state to stimulate the already developing farmland market in Bulgaria, we may expect an increase in the price of farmland by 300-500% over the next 5 or 7 years.

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