Playing detective and planning another viewing trip

Welcome back to the continuation of my whirlwind recap of how I got to where I am now.

When we got back from the November house viewing trip we felt pretty good. One of the biggest challenges to emigrating in the method we had chosen (being organised, not buying site unseen etc) is that you have very limited opportunities to actually view houses. Due to my working conditions (I am a contractor who does not get paid holidays) every day off work has a real monetary impact and this meant that my trips were as short as was practical; I fly out on a Saturday and return on a Tuesday, with Sunday and Monday available as viewing days.

This limitation was a real issue in my head, as prior to the November trip no house which I had been shown had even been close, and the only one I liked I did not know the owner.

Coming back with the Stone Mountain Top houses as something I liked a lot really took a lot of pressure off; finally I had something concrete I could consider and plan around, with a view to viewing with my local friend E in the spring where her advice regarding the track to the house would be vital.

The Mountain House

The other option however remained our favourite and to this end I started the process of trying to track the owners down.

• I wrote a polite letter to the neighbours asking if they could help me out by asking around the village
• I hassled George from Bulgarian Properties to continue his investigations
• I contacted the Embassy in Sofia to ask if they could help by tracking down the tax records for the property
• I made contact with Bill from Investment Link (the eBay sellers) who sent his local contact to the Kmet and the pub to figure it out
• I asked Boris (my friend who was teaching us Bulgarian) to ring the Kmet direct and try to find things out

From all this activity I received no reply from the neighbours and the knowledge that the house was in multiple ownership split between the children of the original owner and these children were split between Germany and Turkey and there was pretty much no chance of finding them. This is the situation with a LOT of properties in Bulgaria, and particularly the south, as the original owners were Turkish and kicked out by the Bulgarians in the 1980s and have never returned.

The Perfect house, sadly not to be mine

As an aside I found out later that the neighbours had originally wanted to buy the property I loved but they had also failed to track down the owners; I suppose this is why they didn't bother to reply.

Fortunately I did not restrict all planning to just this dead end and much thought went into the next viewing trip. We spent many more hours perusing multiple websites and listings and evaluating as best we could the houses for sale. I spoke to a couple of new agents, some based in the UK and some based in Bulgaria.

We decided our next trip would be in March and we hoped to view and maybe offer on the Mountain Houses, as well as making arrangements to fill up both days with viewings (with no resting allowed at all). Sadly before the trip it turned out that one of the two plots which made up Mountain Houses was sold and there was no way I only wanted half of the property so this was shelved.

Also we tried to arrange viewings with Bulgarian House again, the company who had not turned up on the first viewing trip and to be fair to them this time they let me know before the visit that they didn't have anything to show me.

I had found a forest for sale with some hunting lodges on the property but this also fell through after the seller refused to engage with my demand for paperwork. In the end I filled the Sunday with properties listed by a new company called Cheap Bulgarian House which were in a different town to that which we had previously focused on but pragmatism has to rule and there was no reason we wouldn't fall in love over there too.

On the second day I arranged with Bill from Investment Link to meet his local contact Annie to show us round any properties they had (we didn't pick these as they only list on eBay and the lead time for their sales is much shorter). Finally, with half a day free I decided to view an old school I had spotted on Right Move of all places which I had previously discarded as being too expensive and too good.

A School for sale

So, we were ready for our next trip.....