Bulgaria Cheap Properties

GHM, the owner and manager of a hotel portfolio of highly regarded properties such as The Datai and The Setai, said it would open a hotel in Bulgaira under its upscale brand Chedi. The local Chedi hotel will be part of the Thracian Rocks golf resort near Kavarna on the Black Sea, resort manager Josef Halbherr said.In addition to the 60suite boutique hotel, the Chedi complex in the resort will also feature 30 villas and nine apartment blocks. The GHMmanaged complex should be completed in two years.

Real estate company Foros said it has signed up two franchisees, in Plovdiv and in Stara Zagora. The company is also in talks to set up Foros franchises in another 25 local town, including Blagoevgrad, Silistra, Vidin, Gabrovo, Haskovo, Kavarna, Sandanski, Elena and Sliven. The first of the signed contracts are for a period of five years.The Foros franchise project was officially announced in April this year, but has been in the works since December 2007, programme director Milena Mihailova said. The programme targets urban areas where Foros has a market presence.

Bulgarian real estate investment trust REIT BenchMark Fund Imoti has agreed credit lines worth a total 26.5 million euro with the National Bank of Greece and United Bulgarian Bank, part of the NBG Group.The loans should be used within the next two years. The 25 million euro loan from NBG has an eightyear maturity, while the 1.5 million euro loan from UBB matures in 2011. The loans were secured with real estate mortgages and a special pledge on company assets.

FairPlay Commercial, an office property developer that is part of FairPlay International, said it plans to build distribution warehouses and a 120 000 sq m logistics park. The location of the new property developments was not named.The warehouses would most likely be in smaller cities with shortage of purposebuilt logistics properties, FairPlay Commercial board director Mario Zahariev said.

Foreign investors have a 97 per cent share of the total investments in Bulgarian commercial buildings, according to consultant company King Sturge, as quoted by website investor.bg.In Sofia and some other big cities there are pleanty of examples of completed developments, including numerous retail and office buildings. At the initial stage of those developments, there had been a partial share of Bulgarian investors, which was later sold to foreign players.

Carrefour, the French hypermarket chain, announced plans to build a retailentertainment complex in Stara Zagora, weekly Stroitelstvo Gradut said. The total investment will amount to 10 million euro as the property itself will be situated on a land plot of 20 900 sq m. The project features a mall, whose retail space will be 14 575 sq m, as well as hypermarket on a further 6324 sq m.Architect Ilian Iliev of Planning Ltd. has been picked todesign the mall, with Carrefour currently still looking to select a construction company to build it. With the opening of the complex, Carrefour has promised to offer 400 new job positions when the project is completed by 2010 as planned.

Plovdivs architectural studio ArkontA won the tender called to pick a design for the renovation of the citys central railway station, mediapool.bg reported.The National Railway Infrastructure Company NRIC has said, as quoted by Dnevnik daily, that the investor selected to do the renovation will also be granted building permission for additional construction in the area as compensation.

The project to build a second bridge over the Danube River between Vidin in Bulgaria and Calafat in Romania has run into new snags, which may delay its completion, Dnevnik daily reported on July 3.Rather than change the original design, Bulgarias Transport Ministry has decided to carry out a new assessment whether the original design of the bridge will be robust enough to withstand the test of time and elements, the daily said.