Who builds Sofia: 3,070 residential projects since 2021, and how long they take
We followed every residential building permit issued in Sofia since August 2021 through three public registers: the city's permits and completion certificates, the national register of use permits and the Commercial Register. A typical apartment block takes three years from permit to completion. Most developers are companies with a single project. And the next wave of new homes is concentrated in the south and west of the city.
- 3,070 residential projects received a building permit in Sofia in five years. 59% are held by companies and 40% by private individuals, including 339 of the 931 apartment blocks (36%).
- Three years from permit to completion. Apartment blocks permitted from August 2021 to the end of 2022 that have since been completed took a median of 36 months to their completion document. Nine in ten were done within 47 months.
- 148 developer projects are past the usual build time with no completion document found, 48 of them apartment blocks. All 148 were permitted in 2021 or 2022.
- The next homes are coming in the south and west. 2,301 projects have no completion document yet. Malinova Dolina leads with 145, ahead of Ovcha Kupel (117) and Krastova Vada (91). Ten neighbourhoods hold more than a third of all open projects.
- A market of one-project companies. 1,528 developers stand behind the company projects. For 83% of them the registers show a single project since 2021; only 30 have five or more.
Who holds the permits
A building permit names its investor. Across the 3,070 projects, companies hold 1,814 (59%) and private individuals 1,241 (40%); the remaining 15 are held by the municipality or by owners' associations. The private share is high even for apartment blocks: 339 of the 931 permits that describe a multi-family building (36%) name only private persons as investors.
| Building type | Projects | Companies | Private | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apartment blocks (multi-family) | 931 | 583 | 339 | 213 |
| Other residential buildings | 1,844 | 936 | 902 | 498 |
| Houses built by companies | 295 | 295 | n/a | 58 |
| Total | 3,070 | 1,814 | 1,241 | 769 |
Residential building permits issued in Sofia, 18 August 2021 to 29 September 2026. "Other residential buildings" are permits that describe a residential building without stating its type. Single-family houses built by private individuals are left out: a family building its own home is outside the scope of a developer register. "Completed" means a completion document dated after the permit. 15 projects held by the municipality or by owners' associations appear in neither the company nor the private column.
How long a building takes
To measure build time fairly, we look only at permits issued from August 2021 to December 2022. They have had almost four years to finish; younger permits would show only the fast builds. For each building type, the table gives how many have a completion document today and how long those took.
| Building type | Permitted 2021–2022 | Completed | Median months | 9 in 10 within |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apartment blocks | 245 | 142 (58%) | 36 | 47 |
| Other residential buildings | 677 | 356 (53%) | 37 | 50 |
| Houses built by companies | 83 | 46 (55%) | 43 | 49 |
Months from the first building permit to the latest completion document of the same building, for the projects that have one. Buildings still unfinished would only lengthen these times.
For anyone buying a flat off-plan, three years from permit to completion is the realistic baseline for a Sofia apartment block, and four years is not unusual. The permit date and number are public. A completion date promised well inside that range deserves a question to the seller.
The projects without a completion document
Of the 245 apartment blocks permitted in 2021 and 2022, 103 have no completion document in either register: 57 developer projects and 46 private ones. Across all types, 148 developer projects have passed the usual build time for their type, the time within which nine in ten comparable buildings were completed (47 months for apartment blocks, 50 for other residential buildings, never less than three years). They are 48 apartment blocks, 79 other residential buildings and 21 houses.
A missing document can mean several things. The building may be finished and waiting for its paperwork. Construction may have slowed or stopped. The permit may have lapsed, or the document may be missing from the public register. We do not flag private projects at all, because many private owners never file for a completion document. For a buyer, the status is a question to put to the developer, with the permit number in hand.
Where the next homes are coming
2,301 projects have a permit and no completion document yet. We placed 1,975 of them on their cadastral parcel and in a neighbourhood. The ten busiest neighbourhoods account for 704 of those, 36%.
| # | Neighbourhood | Open projects | Apartment blocks | By companies | Completed since 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Malinova Dolina | 145 | 64 | 109 | 67 |
| 2 | Ovcha Kupel | 117 | 38 | 84 | 42 |
| 3 | Krastova Vada | 91 | 37 | 71 | 42 |
| 4 | Manastirski Livadi | 69 | 13 | 53 | 10 |
| 5 | Dragalevtsi | 67 | 27 | 41 | 14 |
| 6 | Lozen | 62 | 4 | 39 | 10 |
| 7 | Simeonovo | 43 | 17 | 27 | 13 |
| 8 | Gardova Glava | 38 | 28 | 25 | 9 |
| 9 | Gorna Banya | 36 | 7 | 20 | 10 |
| 10 | Levski Zone V | 36 | 22 | 20 | 13 |
Open: a residential project with a building permit and no completion document found. "Completed since 2021" counts projects permitted since August 2021 that already have one.
Nine of the ten lie south and west of the centre, in an arc from Gorna Banya in the west to Lozen in the southeast; Levski Zone V in the east is the exception. The mix differs from place to place. In Lozen almost every open project is a house or small residential building, with 4 apartment blocks among 62. In Gardova Glava three in four are apartment blocks. Malinova Dolina combines both: the most open projects in the city and the most apartment blocks, 64.
The full list, with every Sofia neighbourhood that has residential construction since 2021, is on our page New construction in Sofia by neighbourhood, updated every week.
1,528 developers, most with a single project
Bulgarian developers usually set up a separate company for each project. A buyer therefore often meets a company name with no history of its own. To see past that, we matched the investor companies to the Commercial Register and grouped companies majority-owned by the same company: 37 such groups appear among the developers since 2021.
Even after grouping, the market is a long tail. 1,528 developers stand behind the 1,814 company projects. For 1,268 of them (83%) the registers show a single project since 2021. Only 30 developers have five or more projects, and only 6 have ten or more.
For the buyer this means the useful check goes beyond the company on the sales brochure. Who owns it, what else the same owners have built, and how long their earlier buildings took are all on public record, spread across three registers. That is the record we put together for every project in Sofia Pro.
Methodology and caveats
- Permits: building permits for new residential buildings issued by Sofia's Chief Architect (НАГ), 18 August 2021 to 29 September 2026, from the public register. Building type follows the permit description: multi-family, single or two-family house or villa, other residential. Renovations, extensions and non-residential buildings are left out, and so are single-family houses built by private individuals.
- Completion: a certificate of completion from НАГ's register (Act 16) or a use permit from the national construction control directorate (ДНСК, for category I–III buildings), dated after the permit. A ДНСК use permit is linked to the building permit it cites; other completion documents are matched by parcel, date and description. Checked on 19 and 20 October 2026.
- Build time: months from the first permit of a building to the latest completion document, measured on permits issued to 31 December 2022. "Past the usual build time": a developer project with no completion document after the 90th percentile of that time for its building type, and in any case after at least 36 months.
- Developers: investors as named in the permit. Companies are matched to the Commercial Register; companies majority-owned by the same company count as one developer. Minority stakes and shared managers do not merge developers.
- Neighbourhood: the project's cadastral parcel placed within SofiaHoods' 236 neighbourhood boundaries. 2,668 of the 3,070 projects could be placed; the rest have no locatable parcel or lie outside these boundaries.
Free: the number of residential projects in every Sofia neighbourhood, by stage. With Sofia Pro, each project appears on the map with its permit, developer, the group behind it, that developer's earlier projects and how long they took, and the developer's public contacts.
New construction by neighbourhoodFor media: project-level data by neighbourhood, with developers as named in the public registers, is available on request via sofiahoods.com. Please cite and link SofiaHoods.
Corrected on 21 October 2026: the private-investor figures first included 15 projects held by the municipality or by owners' associations (1,256 projects; 348 apartment blocks, 37%).