With the minimum wage in Bulgaria and nearby countries floating around €250 you would have thought that the price of renting an apartment sufficient for one person would be at least no more than €125. Even that is on the high side because you will need at least 200 euros unless you are a wizard at making cheap food and don't have to deal with food allergies from the most common cheap material, wheat flour.

But, as a westerner you may not grasp it right away that there is reasons why the starting point is pretty much €150, even in a village of 20 houses.

First of all, if the landlord is renting through an agent, the standard Bulgarian real estate agent cut out of the rent is 50%

50%!

For reals!

Yeah, ok that's number one factor, but there is a second factor.

On the whole the rental industry is a lot smaller too. Probably about half the population lives in property they own.

Bulgarians especially have some incredibly propertarian customs relating to property such as the one above. You probably can see (and will see better if you click it and view its original quite large form), that the walls are something of a patchwork.

Many apartments are even more extremely varied in their outer cladding than this, as many people pay builders to add a 2 inch thick insulation layer composed of foam pinned in with concrete mounting bolts, covered in a type of heat resistant fabric mesh and then coated over top with a layer of mortar render, very often tinted with oxide pigments not nearly the same as the fading communist era paint that was never refreshed since it was built.

I remember similarly odd especially propertarian customs when I was walking through Italy too. Private Property signs are everywhere. Especially around the heartland of Italian Socialism (Bologna), known as fascism. The irony of looking at private property signs on a gate closing off a 'collective' residential area. Not that I was expecting I could just walk into the house and plop myself on the couch, but not even to be able to walk on the road past the little houses...

Though very often, a small minority of the residents, usually the older die hard commie grandmas who lived there since it was built, who nose around in every other resident's property and snitch on people for all kinds of reasons. Obviously for this reason, a lot of bulgarians are very nervous around their residential blocks and especially if you are a foreigner because the snitchy grandmas are especially alert to foreigners, who, according to commie baba must be too rich and fancy to live in a shitty old communist era apartment block.

Which brings me to the final part of this article, the conclusion: As a poor foreigner like myself, who didn't show up with even €1000 in my pocket, the rents are very high, and the neighbours can often be very difficult and stupid.

I hope you enjoyed my little story about the property market in the Balkans (most likely applicable all over the bloc).