Bulgaria could be the testing ground destination to successfully introduce fractional ownership to the Russian buyer market, according to several industry observers.

Few fractional companies have so far begun operating in Bulgaria, but it attracted almost 300,000 Russian tourists last year, according to the Bulgarian National Statistics Institute, and is consistently the most searched for destination on Russian portals such as prian.ru.

While most agree that Russian buyers are uncomfortable with anything associated with timeshare, attitudes are changing, according to Irina Kryuchkova CEO of Russian agent Clever Realty.

“So far they’ve not been willing to accept the idea of fractional but other concepts such as mortgages are already being accepted by Russians where they weren’t before,” she said. “In the coming year it will be a good idea to introduce fractional to the Russian market.

"Russians are already very familiar with Bulgaria – it’s not like a far away destination like the Caribbean that they don’t know about,” she added. “It’s just a matter of explaining to the Russian market what fractional is. It has to come with a sense of stability, because Russians often do not know what their financial situation will be like in five or ten years time.”

Early signs
Some in Bulgaria are already convinced of the potential of shared ownership. “I think the developers and their agents should rewrite their selling strategy and implement fractional as soon as possible,” said Nikolay Kasabov, director of Bulgarian Sales and Management Construction. “It gives companies the tools to combat the current economic difficulties but insulates the developers and agents from having to erode margins.”

Paul MacSherry, VP business development at exchange network The Registry Collection said he had been approached by at least one fractional developer with serious plans to build in Bulgaria, but introducing the concept wouldn’t be easy.

“It’s still a new, emerging market and is right behind Spain in terms of numbers of people who’ve been hurt by the property crash. There’s a predominance of stock there at the moment, so much that it’s hard to sell anything. So it would be a big challenge – but it’s a market of opportunity.”

However, there was potential in the Russian market, he said. “We’ve got a number of Russian members in the Registry Collection and it’s a growing base – there are people buying and selling shared ownership in some form in Russia.”