You view a flat and you are told 59 square metres. At home you lay out the floor plan, add up the rooms and get 54. The first feeling is that someone lied to you.
Nobody did. Bulgaria measures a flat differently from what buyers from Ukraine, Russia or Poland are used to. It is much better to learn this before you sign the preliminary contract than after.
There are two areas, not one
A Bulgarian price list almost always shows two figures. Chista plosht is the flat itself: rooms, kitchen, bathroom, terraces, internal walls. Obshti chasti is your share of what belongs to the whole building: staircase, lift, corridors, entrance, technical rooms.
Add them together and you get obshta plosht. That is the figure that goes into the contract, and that is the figure the price is calculated on.
What it looks like in a real price list
The Aura complex in Nessebar, developer GMD Invest. The price list sits as an open file on the developer website, with three columns in a row: clean area, common areas, total.
Apartment 1: 54.51 plus 4.96 equals 59.47 sq m, price 142,730 euro.
Apartment 7: 84.62 plus 8.33 equals 92.95 sq m, price 213,790 euro.
Apartment 8: 105.28 plus 10.17 equals 115.45 sq m, price 265,540 euro.
The share of common areas is the same everywhere, between 8 and 9 per cent. That is the normal Bulgarian figure. Be wary if a price list shows 15 per cent or more: it means the building has a lot of space you pay for but never use.
What it does to the price per metre
Apartment 1 is 142,730 euro for 59.47 sq m, which is 2,400 euro per metre. But the metres you actually walk on are 54.51. So a metre of your own flat costs 2,618 euro. The difference is 218 euro on every metre.
The number itself is not frightening. What is frightening is comparing two listings where one is priced on total area and the other on clean area. You are not comparing flats, you are comparing counting methods.
If you are looking at new builds — see new-build apartments by the sea in Bulgaria.
The whole market counts this way
This is not one developer being clever. Open the table of available flats at BS-Group in the La Mer Home 3 complex: the area column is named outright, area with common parts. Apartment 1, 38.48 sq m, 55,560 euro including VAT. Those 38.48 already contain the share of the staircase and the lift.
Everyone in Bulgaria measures this way: developers, agencies and the notary. The separate area you are used to simply does not exist here.
What to ask before the preliminary contract
Three questions close the subject in five minutes.
First: what is the clean area and what are the common parts, as two separate figures rather than one sum. Second: are the terraces included in the clean area and how many metres are they. Third: which area the maintenance fee is calculated on, the total or the clean one, because that difference comes back every single year.
All three answers are in the developer price list. If the seller cannot give them, that is an answer in itself.
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