€120,000 on paper, €185,000 in reality: the true yield of a Sofia apartment
The off-plan price tag is the first of two. By the time a tenant finally moves in, four years have passed and the bill is €65,000 higher than the listing said. Here is the arithmetic, and what it does to rental yield across the city.
A new one-bedroom in Lyulin 10 lists at €120,000. The agent does the maths on the spot: it rents for about €585 a month, so that is a 5.9% gross yield and it pays itself back in seventeen years, one of the best returns in the city. Our own ranking agrees. Across the 81 Sofia neighbourhoods where we can measure both sale and rent prices, Lyulin sits among the fastest-paying addresses in Sofia, while the prestige belt drags out past thirty years. Every one of those numbers is correct. Every one of them also describes an apartment that does not exist yet.
- A €120,000 off-plan one-bedroom really costs about €185,000 by the time someone can live in it: the price, ~€5,000 in tax and fees, and ~€60,000 to finish and furnish a bare shell.
- And it earns nothing for roughly four years: two waiting for Act 16, then up to two more turning concrete into a home.
- That gap turns the advertised 5.9% yield into about 3.8% effective, and the seventeen-year payback into closer to thirty.
- The headline yield ranking still holds across the city: gross paybacks run from ~12 years in the cheap north and west to ~40 in the prestige belt. But they are advertised, gross, finished-apartment numbers.
The second price tag
Almost all new construction in Sofia is sold before Act 16, „по БДС“: the building is structurally complete, but each apartment is a concrete shell with screed floors, plastered walls and capped pipes. No bathroom, no kitchen, no doors. The advertised €/m² buys the shell. Everything that makes it a place a tenant will pay for is a second budget, and that budget is where the yield quietly disappears.
| What a €120,000 off-plan apartment actually costs | Step | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| Contract price (65 m² in Lyulin 10, €1,846/m²) | 120,000 | 120,000 |
| Transfer tax, notary, registration (~4%)5 | 4,800 | 124,800 |
| Finish and furnish the shell, comfortable standard7 | 60,000 | 184,800 |
| All-in, before a single month of rent | ~€185,000 |
So the €120,000 on the contract is really €180,000 for the apartment and its finish, and close to €185,000 once the state is paid. A lean, disciplined finish can hold the works to around €36,000; a comfortable, not-luxury job for a flat someone will actually want to rent lands near €60,000, half again the price of the shell. We costed that budget line by line, from waterproofing to curtain rails, in the finishing-cost breakdown.
And four years before the first tenant
Money is only half of it. The other half is time. From the preliminary contract to Act 16 is typically two years, and from a project’s launch three or four. Then the finishing begins, and finishing a flat around a full-time job, contractor by contractor, stretches to a year or two of its own. Four years is a realistic span from signature to the first tenant. At €585 a month, those four idle years are about €28,000 of rent the apartment never earned, on top of €185,000 of capital sitting still.
Put the real number back into the yield. The €585 monthly rent against €185,000 all-in is a gross yield of about 3.8%, not 5.9%, and a payback near thirty years once the dead time counts, not seventeen. The brochure’s return was real, for a building that was not there. Reselling once it is finished can recover part of the gap, since a finished apartment lists above a shell, but the premium has to beat the full €60,000 of works and the year of managing them before any of it is profit.
The advertised ranking, and what it assumes
With that caveat in hand, the citywide ranking is still worth reading, because the same €585 rent attaches to wildly different prices. Tenants pay between €7 and €11 per square metre almost regardless of address; buyers pay anywhere from €1,585 to €4,712. Gross payback therefore runs from about twelve years to about forty, and the chart below shows the span on finished-apartment, asking-price terms.
Where rent pays the apartment back fastest
| Neighbourhood | Buy €/m² | Rent €/m²·mo | Gross yield | Payback |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moderno predgradie1 | 1,585 | 11 | 8.3% | ~12 yrs |
| Orlandovtsi | 1,920 | 10 | 6.3% | ~16 yrs |
| Lyulin 5 | 1,799 | 9 | 6.0% | ~17 yrs |
| Lyulin 10 | 1,846 | 9 | 5.9% | ~17 yrs |
| Lyulin 9 | 1,895 | 9 | 5.7% | ~18 yrs |
| Zone B-19 | 2,311 | 10 | 5.2% | ~19 yrs |
| Gorublyane | 2,092 | 9 | 5.2% | ~19 yrs |
| Malinova dolina | 2,349 | 10 | 5.1% | ~20 yrs |
| Obelya 2 | 1,882 | 8 | 5.1% | ~20 yrs |
| Ilientsi | 1,701 | 7 | 4.9% | ~20 yrs |
1 Moderno predgradie's quoted median rent (€11/m²) sits above the median of its live rental listings (€9/m², 18 listings). At the conservative figure the yield is ~6.8% and payback ~15 years, still the fastest in Sofia.
Where it takes longest
| Neighbourhood | Buy €/m² | Rent €/m²·mo | Gross yield | Payback |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bistritsa2 | 2,399 | 5 | 2.5% | ~40 yrs |
| Izgrev | 4,712 | 10 | 2.6% | ~39 yrs |
| Yavorov | 4,183 | 9 | 2.6% | ~39 yrs |
| Iztok | 4,176 | 10 | 2.9% | ~35 yrs |
| Geo Milev | 3,337 | 8 | 2.9% | ~35 yrs |
| Ivan Vazov | 4,098 | 10 | 2.9% | ~34 yrs |
| Strelbishte | 3,242 | 8 | 3.0% | ~34 yrs |
| Lozenets | 4,008 | 10 | 3.0% | ~33 yrs |
| Hipodruma | 3,413 | 9 | 3.2% | ~32 yrs |
| Lagera | 3,027 | 8 | 3.2% | ~32 yrs |
2 Bistritsa is a village within Sofia municipality and its rental market is thin (20 live listings), so the figure mostly reflects weak rental demand.
The prestige paradox
The shape of the ranking has a simple mechanical cause. Sofia’s tenants pay between €7 and €11 per square metre almost regardless of address: the rental market prices commute, condition and size. Buyers pay up to three times more per square metre for the same address. The buyer covers the difference between Izgrev at €4,712/m² and Lyulin 10 at €1,846/m² entirely at purchase, while the rent the apartment earns afterwards is nearly the same at both.
For an owner-occupier that premium buys parks, schools and status, a consumption choice and a perfectly legitimate one. For an investor it is dead weight. For renters the conclusion inverts: the prestige belt is precisely where renting is cheapest relative to owning. A tenant in Iztok occupies an asset yielding its owner under 3% gross, before tax, vacancy and repairs, and before the off-plan arithmetic above. The fast-paying north and west, Orlandovtsi, the Lyulin blocks, Obelya, hold prices below €2,000/m² against citywide rents, with Malinova dolina the one southern exception on the strength of heavy new supply.
What the spreadsheet leaves out
The €60,000 finishing line is itself an average of a process the numbers cannot show. Buying off-plan, you do not hand over a budget and receive a home. You become the unpaid project manager of a small construction site, a second job you never applied for, run in the evenings and on weekends around the one that pays you.
How Sofia compares
None of this makes Sofia a poor market by regional standards; it makes the advertised number optimistic. By Numbeo’s city-centre measure Sofia’s gross yield (~4.0%) sits ahead of Prague (2.8%), Budapest (3.4%) and Vienna (1.9%), and behind Warsaw (4.3%)6; Global Property Guide’s 2026 citywide figures put Bucharest (6.0%) and Warsaw (5.9%) clearly ahead of Sofia’s 4.2%. Sofia is mid-pack for the region. The rental market rewards a buyer here better than in most of Central Europe, the prestige belt still rewards the tenant, and the off-plan shell rewards patience above all. We worked the full rent-versus-buy comparison in the finishing-cost analysis; and if you are buying to invest, the four exit paths are compared in the off-plan investment analysis.
Methodology & caveats
- Source: imot.bg published median asking prices (sale €/m²; rent €/m²/month), snapshot of 9 June 2026.
- Coverage: 81 of 249 tracked places, those with both sale and rent medians and sufficient live-listing volume (≥30 sale and ≥20 rental listings). Duplicate price pairs from overlapping zones were removed.
- Gross yield = monthly rent × 12 ÷ sale price (per m²). Payback = the inverse, in years. The headline calculation excludes vacancy, maintenance, taxes, fees and finishing; net yields are typically 1–1.5 points lower, and the off-plan effective yield lower still.
- The worked example uses Lyulin 10 (€1,846/m², rent €9/m²·mo) for a 65 m² flat: €120,000 price, ~€4,800 transaction costs, ~€60,000 finishing and furnishing, ~€28,000 of rent foregone across a four-year wait. Effective gross yield = €585 × 12 ÷ €184,800.
- Asking prices. All figures are asking medians; final transaction prices typically settle lower. Both sides of the ratio are asking figures, which partially offsets the bias, so absolute levels should be read as approximate.
- Finishing-state mix. Asking prices blend finished resale with unfinished (по БДС) new builds. In construction-heavy neighbourhoods the advertised €/m² understates the move-in cost by the finishing bill, so their gross yields read higher than an investor's effective yield.
- Sources: 5 Sofia transfer tax 3% + notary + 0.1% registration ≈ 4–5% total, purchase-cost calculator 2026; 6 Numbeo city-centre gross yields and Global Property Guide, May 2026; 7 itemised SofiaHoods cost model for a 65 m² БДС apartment: lean €28,000–43,500; good modern standard €46,000–76,700, most projects near €56,000–66,500; premium €87,000+.
SofiaHoods scores all Sofia neighbourhoods on transport, parks, schools, noise and construction, free of charge. The full 81-hood yield ranking, per-hood prices and value scores are part of Sofia Pro.
Explore the mapPress: the full dataset and methodology are available on request via sofiahoods.com. Please credit and link SofiaHoods when citing these figures.