Trustable lawyer

Don't rely on your lawyer (or the notary) doing all the work - make sure that you check EVERYTHING yourself. There's no real comeback if either (or both) of them screw up, and YOU will get the bill if something needs to corrected after the fact. It's also not unheard of for additional owners to appear out of the woodwork after a sale's gone through if the property in question was inherited. Recommendations for lawyers are like those for restaurants - you need to ask yourself if the person praising some chef can actually recognise good food when they see it; we all know what it's like the morning after a dodgy meal.....

Any translation is just for reference, only the original Bulgarian version counts and lawyers are rarely accredited translators anyway.

Utility/tax bills etc have to be settled before the sale is completed; the notary will check this.

I've bought and sold several properties in my two decades here and I have to say that I wouldn't recommend any of the "professionals" I've dealt with in that time. The best you can hope for is to light on one of the least bad ones.....

@Alex1959  I got a QC on speed dial out here, susses out the real deal for me down the shop on a pint of milk and eggs.

Alex mate you dont need a lawyer to check your bills. Daylight robbery that is. Get down to Easypay with the meter readings.  Job done.

@JimJ

It is impossible to miss any if the notary does a check with the inheritant document from the municipality is provided. Even if some somehow appear they can t claim the house, they can only sue each other, not the owner.

Our lawyers must be very poor if after studying years in university, their job is to check electricity bills for foreigners. It is true that only the crap lawyers without work get involved with foreigners buying houses. Good lawyers have lots of work in the legal system and its paid well, some are even visiting the property and measure the land and building size to confirm all is as written in the documents.

So if a lawyer is willing to do simple jobs like checking electricity bills they must be crap.

@Adriana Petrova

I think that something's been lost in translation, Adriana: no-one (or at least not I) was suggesting that the lawyer would be reading electricity meters etc.  My point was that the notary will check, by means of receipts furnished by the vendor, that all relevant bills have been paid up to the date of the notary act.

As for "Our lawyers must be very poor..", I can only say this:  I was a solicitor in London for a number of years and in the last 20 years here in Bulgaria I've had the "pleasure" of retaining probably 8 or 10 firms of lawyers for what I'd call pretty simple jobs.  I can say with my hand on my heart that they were indeed without exception "crap" - they were all inefficient and totally unprofessional, and every one of them asked to be paid either in cash or via a foreign bank account.  None was willing to give an official receipt.  Their work was unprofessional and shoddy - embarrassingly so - and not a single one would have lasted five minutes in any decent UK legal practice; indeed they would have been struck off by the Law Society for incompetence and malpractice.  The number of mistakes they made and problems they missed was staggering, even to someone unfamiliar with the Bulgarian legal system, such as it is. 

Frankly, I suspect that checking electricity bills is not so much beneath their dignity but more beyond the competence of the majority of them, despite their bombastic protestations that they know what they're doing.  I'm sure that there must be some who are good but who knows where they're hiding!

@JimJ Did you try any of the legal 500 firms in Bulgaria?.

Hello everyone,

@Alex1959, have you been able to find a professional ?

We would appreciate if you could provide an update.

All the best

Bhavna

@Zooldrool

Legal500 (and one or two other similar outfits) make their money from subscriptions and advertising by the law firms they rate - how much trust would YOU place in their entries?  They also tend to list mostly corporate law firms, hardly surprisingly since they aren't cheap - those are the most expensive firms to hire and they'll usually concentrate on their corporate clients at the expense of private ones.  There are also far too many young people becoming lawyers here - as academics, politicians and business people who need workers with skills in more useful disciplines regularly point out in the media.

We have used MH Legal in Varna multiple times and they are really good and speak perfect English too.

Try Matrix Relocation. I had perfect results with them.

What would you need a lawyer to check your utility bills for please?

@JosieCrew

Seriously? You wouldn't - that's supposed to be the notary's job.  The object is to make sure that there are no outstanding utility bills etc..

@JimJ Ok, I understand now, I read it like you have to take your bills to be looked at for something each month

If its just part of conveyancing checks, that makes sense.

That will teach me not to read posts while in meetings

@JosieCrew

Easy to misunderstand posts, I think we've all done it at least once!

It's part of the notary's job to make sure the buyer isn't buying unexpected bills along with the house -- mortgages, other secured loans, council tax, utilities. The buyer becomes responsible for any existing bills related to the property as soon as they buy.

@janemulberry Thanks, thats how it works in Spain too, if they've left a huge bill, you become responsible for it, and they wont reconnect your water/elec etc until you've paid it, not without a lot of hassle, and rules they make up as they go along, anyway

Thankfully I got the opposite surprise when I bought my house. Somehow the water was 5 cubic metres in credit!

Ooh nice!

@janemulberry

The previous bill was probably an estimate, or even the last in a series of estimates.  It's perhaps worth knowing that it's illegal for water companies to disconnect you here, even if you haven't paid for donkey's years; before anyone asks - no, that doesn't go for any other utility bill...

I am pretty sure that the meter was actually read. I wasn't there at the time, but my neighbour told me the meter reader had been and someone had clearly been poking around in the water meter hole - they didn't put the straw bags back!

@janemulberry

Did you check the readings afterwards?  Outside water meters regularly freeze up in the winter, and I'm currently renovating an apartment in which neither of the water meters are in any way legible, and in any case the resident NEVER answered the door to ANYONE in the past 25 years, be they cops, bailiffs or whoever...but we're still getting regular water bills!