Over the past 10 years, house prices in Bulgaria have jumped by about 30%, according to Eurostat data. The increase in rents is just over 10%. The average increase for EU member states is 28.6% and rents 15%.

In the third quarter of last year, the year-on-year rise in housing prices in Bulgaria reached 3.2%, which places us in fourth place in terms of growth rate. For the fourth quarter of 2020, growth was 4.8% year-over-year.

For the ten-year period considered, Eurostat data show that housing prices in our country have only decreased in the period 2011-2013. However, this does not apply to rentals. Until 2017, prices were on the rise, and after mid-2017 their pace was outpaced by the increase in rents.

Over the past decade for all European Union member states, the strongest increase in housing prices in Estonia – 112.8%. Rents jumped a record 143%. In second and third places are Luxembourg (99.8%) and Hungary (90.6%), and also in the top five are Latvia (85.6%) and Austria (81.4%). Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Malta, among others, are just some of the countries where housing prices are rising as well.
At the other end of the ranking is our southern neighbor – Greece, where the drop is 28.1%. In Italy and Spain 15.2% and 5.2%, respectively.

The trend in rentals is different. There is only a decrease in two countries – Greece (-25.2%) and Cyprus (-4.1%). After Estonia, the strongest increases were recorded in Lithuania (109.2%) and Iceland (61.8%).