What you saw
becomes yours.
The seller is not liable for a defect that was visible at the viewing. For a hidden one the seller is liable for one year, and that year runs from the handover of possession, not from the day the stain appeared.
A viewing is not just looking around. It allocates liability.
The buyer walks into the apartment thinking they are having a look. Legally, they are doing something quite different: moving a boundary. The seller’s liability for defects is strict, meaning it applies even when the seller did not know about the defect, and a clause releasing the seller from it is void. The exception is precisely the viewing. Under Article 193(2) of the Obligations and Contracts Act (ЗЗД), the seller is not liable for defects that were known to the buyer.
Case law divides defects into two kinds. An apparent defect can be spotted in an ordinary inspection: damaged walls and floors, broken glass, visible cracks. It becomes the buyer’s problem from the moment the buyer stood in front of it. A hidden defect cannot be spotted during inspection and handover, and shows itself over time: leaks, damp, mould, cracks that appear later. The seller is liable for it, but within a time limit.
And the time limit is the second half of the bad news. Under Article 197 of the Obligations and Contracts Act, for real property it is one year, and three years only if the seller knowingly concealed the defect, which the buyer has to prove. The clock starts from the handover of possession, not from the day the stain appeared.
Put the two together. Those twelve months include the first winter, but usually not the second. Damp that comes through in the second winter is outside the time limit, however obvious it looks afterwards. Everything you saw becomes yours immediately, and for everything you did not see you have one year, which is already running.
The viewing record
proves two things, not one
The sheet signed at the door, the viewing record (протокол за оглед), is treated as a formality. It is evidence, with a double effect, and almost nobody sees the second effect.
The first is familiar. The record proves the causal link, that is, who brought the buyer to this property. In a judgment of 21 January 2019, the Burgas District Court (Районен съд Бургас) ordered a seller to pay commission even though the deal had been completed without the agency: the evidence was not witness testimony but the signed contract plus the record initialled by the buyer, stating that they had seen the home with the agency’s help. The line holds in both directions: what is paid for is the causal link, not the signature. The Commission for Consumer Protection (Комисия за защита на потребителите), upheld by the Supreme Administrative Court (Върховен административен съд) and the Sofia City Court (Софийски градски съд), treats as prohibited a clause in a viewing record that extends the commission to relatives and related persons: a client cannot be bound through a viewing record to obligations that belong in an agency agreement. More in the agent’s commission.
The second effect is the quiet one. The same sheet records the date and the fact of the viewing, that is, the moment from which apparent defects are deemed known under Article 193(2) of the Obligations and Contracts Act. Nobody signs a viewing record with that in mind.
That is why a well run viewing is documented, and why the documenting is not a formality for the buyer to rush through at the door. The only sheet in the whole procedure that allocates both money and liability is signed standing up, between two doors, in thirty seconds.
Legal title cannot be seen from any floor
The buyer saves their time for the viewing and delegates the documents. The asymmetry runs exactly the other way. A poor viewing means overpaying for repairs. A poor document check means losing the property.
A viewing shows none of the following: who the owner is and whether there are co-owners, what encumbrances are registered, whether there is an unregistered claim, whether the notarial deed (нотариален акт) is a declaratory one (Interpretative Decision No 11 of 21 March 2013 of the General Assembly of the Civil Chambers of the Supreme Court of Cassation (ОСГК на ВКС) held that such a deed does not carry material evidentiary force as to ownership), what debts the owners’ association (етажна собственост) has and what the general meeting has already voted for. What each certificate does and does not prove is in how to check a property before buying.
A separate case is an illegal alteration: it is not merely invisible, it is guaranteed not to show in the very document the buyer relies on for reassurance. No building permit means no certificate through which the change enters the cadastre, which means the cadastral scheme of the unit (схема на самостоятелен обект) still shows the old layout. So the three documents the buyer compares match because they come from one original source, not because someone measured three times. It continues in illegal alterations.
A buyer who has gone round the apartment three times with a torch and accepted the documents as they were handed over has done the cheaper half of the work.
The landslide is not on the terrace
and the bank knows before you do
The northern coast of Varna, that is, the area around Alen Mak, Chaika, Kabakum, Sveti Nikola and Vinitsa, lies in a landslide belt. This is a systemic risk of the area, not an exception for an individual property, and for us it is the first filter, before the price and before the floor area.
The state company Geozashtita (Геозащита) describes the check as work with documents, not observation: a query against the general development plan (общ устройствен план) of the relevant municipality shows whether the property falls within the boundaries of the building ban, and for construction an up-to-date opinion on the geodynamic condition of the landslide area is required from the company or one of its branches. The ban covers certain areas in the municipalities of Varna, Aksakovo, Balchik and Kavarna. Separately, the areas around Varna lie in a zone of seismic intensity grade seven (coefficient Kc = 0.10 under Regulation No RD-02-20-2 of 2012 on design for earthquakes). That is a characteristic of the building, not of the view.
The practical consequence is sharper than the theoretical one. With a buyer using a loan, the deal falls through at the valuation stage, after the property has already been chosen, the valuation has been paid for and a preliminary contract (предварителен договор) with a deadline has been signed. Lending in landslide zones is refused or heavily restricted, and that decision is not made on site and cannot be argued with. So the most expensive question in the whole purchase is settled by a public map and an opinion issued on application, and the viewing plays no part in it at all.
One stain, three bills, and none of them can be read by eye
The buyer sees a dark patch in the corner and imagines one bill. There are three phenomena behind it, and they differ not in the kind of repair but in who pays.
Condensation is the cheapest case: a matter of ventilation, window frames and how the home is lived in, and the cost is the owner’s and small. Rising damp, the kind that climbs up from the floor, comes down to the building’s waterproofing and cannot be solved by one owner. Penetrating damp and leaks come from the roof, a terrace, a riser pipe or the neighbour above, which means the cost is shared or someone else’s, not yours. Normal relative humidity in a home is between 40 and 60 per cent.
Here comes the part this article will not give you: how to tell them apart. Not because it is a secret, but because they cannot be told apart in a single viewing, and any text claiming otherwise is selling confidence. A freshly painted corner, furniture against an outside wall, the air conditioning running and windows open are entirely lawful things for a seller to do, and they make all three kinds of damp invisible for an hour and a half.
The difference is caught with an instrument, not the eye. A thermographic survey before purchase looks precisely for hidden leaks and damp in walls, ceilings and bathrooms, poorly sealed window frames, terrace falls and waterproofing. An architectural and structural survey is offered at about €0.77 to €1.53 per sq m, which is between €58 and €115 for a 75 sq m apartment, less than one monthly maintenance fee in an expensive complex. What the repair costs, if it comes to that, is in renovation or a ready home.
Eleven in the morning
tests nothing in the standard
Noise has a standard, and it is set in regulation, not a matter of taste. Regulation No 6 of 26 June 2006 on environmental noise indicators (Наредба № 6) divides the day into three periods: day from 7:00 to 19:00, evening from 19:00 to 23:00 and night from 23:00 to 7:00. The limit values differ for the three periods, and the strictest of them is the night value for rooms in residential buildings, that is, for the bedroom.
A viewing at eleven on a weekday tests not a single line of that table. The standard that decides whether you will sleep applies between 23:00 and 7:00. The daytime value for the zone is measured exactly when the children are at school and the venue on the ground floor is empty and opens at six in the evening.
The same goes for everything that depends on the hour rather than on attention: light and orientation look different in the morning and in the afternoon, and different in January and in August; parking shows itself at eight in the evening; water pressure at peak hours; life in the entrance hall in the evening and on Saturday.
This leads to the only practical sentence this article allows itself, because it is not a checklist but a limitation: the second viewing is not for a sharper eye. It is for a different hour. And this leads to the honest argument for us: the buyer enters the building once, at the hour they can get away from work. The agency enters many times, at different times, and with other properties in the same entrance.
The questions whose answer is a document, not an observation
There are a few things about the building that decide the cost of a mistake. What they have in common is that the answer cannot be seen anywhere on site.
Whether the building has a technical passport. The technical passport (технически паспорт) describes the building’s technical characteristics and records all construction work after it was put into service, and for existing buildings it is commissioned by the owners at their own expense. In practice, a huge part of the housing stock has no passport, and that in itself is an answer.
Who maintains the lift and when the last inspection was. The first periodic technical inspection is twenty-four months after it is put into service, and every twelve months after that. Supervision in residential buildings is carried out by a licensed body under a contract with the owners’ association. None of this can be seen from inside the lift car.
Whether the general meeting has already taken decisions. They bind the new owner. A decision to replace the lift or repair the roof, taken a week before the deal, is an obligation the buyer inherits without having voted for it, and the notary does not check debts to the owners’ association, because they are not among the notary’s mandatory checks.
And the number that never appears in the listing. The confirmed range of the maintenance fee in Varna is €5.83 to €15.61 per sq m per year, based on our survey of 11 listings stating a fee (out of 16 opened) as of 4 September 2026, so it is indicative. At twelve euros and 75 sq m that is €900 a year and €9,000 over ten years without indexation. The dividing line is not city versus sea but amenities: city addresses with a pool and reception cost as much as resort ones. The full mechanics are in owners’ associations.
The neighbours: the only area
where the answer is “you can’t”
For neighbours there is no register, no certificate and no document. A check before the deal does not exist. This is a rare case where the honest answer to “how do I check” is “you can’t”: the only things that work are a second visit at a different hour and a conversation with the building manager, who is, however, a party, not a source.
It is also worth knowing what kind of market this is happening in. According to an analysis by Address Real Estate (Адрес Недвижими имоти), distributed through the Bulgarian News Agency (БТА) on 26 May 2026, the average buyer now makes about 10 viewings, against about eight a year earlier, the deal takes two and a half to three months, and the typical discount when haggling, when there is one at all, is between €2,000 and €4,000. The figures refer to Sofia and the big cities; there is no study with a methodology specifically for Varna.
Read them together with the first section. Ten viewings are ten times an hour and a half, almost always at the same convenient hour, across ten different properties. And a discount of €2,000 to €4,000 does not cover even one misunderstanding over waterproofing for which the time limit under Article 197 of the Obligations and Contracts Act has already expired.
A viewing is not an exam you pass by trying harder. It is a narrow window that shows condition, not title, condition at one hour, not across the whole day, and it hands whoever looks through it the liability for everything they have seen.
Frequently asked questions
Is the seller liable for a defect I saw at the viewing?
No. Under Article 193(2) of the Obligations and Contracts Act, the seller is not liable for defects that were known to the buyer. Case law calls such defects apparent, meaning they can be spotted in an ordinary inspection of the property: damaged walls and floors, broken glass, visible cracks. From the moment of the viewing they are the buyer’s problem, however much the repair costs afterwards. That is exactly why a viewing is not just looking around: it moves a boundary of liability, and the signed viewing record documents when that happened.
How long do I have to bring a claim for a hidden defect?
For real property the time limit under Article 197 of the Obligations and Contracts Act is one year, and three years only if the seller knowingly concealed the defect, which the buyer has to prove. The most important detail is where the count starts: the time limit runs from the handover of possession, that is, from receiving the keys, not from the day the defect showed itself. The practical consequence is that those twelve months include the first winter but usually not the second, and damp that comes through in the second winter is already outside the time limit.
Can condensation be told apart from a leak or rising damp at a viewing?
At a single viewing, no. The three look almost the same for an hour and a half, and the difference between them is the difference between a small cost for the owner and a shared repair through the general meeting. A freshly painted corner, furniture right against an outside wall, the air conditioning running and windows open are entirely lawful actions that make all three kinds of damp invisible. Diagnosis is done with an instrument, not the eye: a thermographic survey looks for hidden leaks and damp in walls, ceilings and bathrooms, poorly sealed window frames and waterproofing problems.
Why is a second viewing at a different hour recommended?
Because some of the property’s characteristics simply do not exist at the convenient hour for a viewing. Regulation No 6 of 26 June 2006 on environmental noise indicators divides the day into day from 7:00 to 19:00, evening from 19:00 to 23:00 and night from 23:00 to 7:00, with the strictest limit value being the night value for rooms in residential buildings. A viewing at eleven in the morning tests not a single line of that standard. The same applies to parking, which shows itself in the evening, to water pressure at peak hours, to light in winter and to life in the entrance hall on Saturday. The second viewing is not for looking more carefully but for a different hour.
Go a second time
at 22:00.
If you already like a property, do not go a third time and look more carefully. Go a second time at a different hour. The same entrance at ten on a Friday evening shows the noise, the parking, the stairwell lighting and life in the entrance hall, exactly the things that simply do not exist at a viewing at eleven in the morning. It is one hour of your evening, and it is the only thing on this topic you can really do yourself.
Send us the address and the time of your first viewing. We send back what was left unchecked at that hour and at that address: whether the area lies in a landslide belt, which documents need to be obtained before a deposit is paid, which questions about the building make sense and which part of what you saw has already become your liability by law. If the property turns out to be a problem, you will hear it from us before the deposit, not a year later.
Information as of 4 September 2026. It is not legal advice and does not replace a lawyer, an engineer or a technical expert. Amounts are in euros at the fixed rate of 1 EUR = 1.95583 BGN.
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