Bulgaria's holiday property market was saturated and big projects found no buyers because they were unprofitable, the managing director of Foros real estate agency Dobromir Ganev has said.

Local company Terra Trans Consult has suspended a 200 million euro holiday village project in Balchik due to the severe economic conditions, the town’s mayor Nikolai Angelov said. The company’s Balchik Paradise complex was to deliver houses, a hotel, a spa centre, a conference hall and a cinema hall.

Tsonko Tsonev, the mayor of neighbouring Kavarna,however, has said that none of the investors in projects near the town were selling their developments, nor suspending construction work.

The tight credit market has not dampened demand for homes, but it did cause buyers to scale down the amount they were willing to invest, while also becoming less picky about the size, floor, exposure and location of the property. Buyers were moving to more peripheral areas where prices were lower, Ganev said.

While investment purchases have not stopped, prices were now lower than even a year ago, he said. The latest trend was to buy stores and rent them out, he added.

Farmland prices have gone through the roof with some selling for 20 000 leva a ha. Farmers, however, were facing difficult times because of frozen European Union subsidies, which made further increases of prices unlikely.