In 13 years in the property business, Liubomir Stanimirov, chief executive of ImotiBG, has seen a lot. But he always remembers from where he started. 





A classified job ad was Liubomir Stanimirov’s point of departure into the world of real estate. Back then, in 1993, he was a second-year student in economics and admittedly had no idea what a real estate agent did.

“At the time, contracts were handwritten, the Internet did not exist and people would sell a green meadow based on a rough sketch of what could eventually be there,” Stanimirov remembers. He lived through the 1999 re-denomination of the Bulgarian lev from 1000 to 1, and remembers cases where signed deals fell though because buyers who had their money in leva woke up cashless when 1 new lev became equal to 1 Deutsche mark, while prices had been in dollars before the devaluation occurred.

Today, 35-year-old Stanimirov is chief executive officer of ImotiBG, a real estate agency that in five years of operation has acquired a 5 to 7 per cent market share in the Sofia residential property market, its main focus, which they leaven with a bit of Black Sea and mountain holiday home properties. If the number seems small, consider that there are about 1500 real estate agencies in Sofia alone.

“Our growth is related to our clients, and how our clients find us is an interesting story,” Stanimirov says. ImotiBG relies on the oldest, simplest, time-tested tool of marketing – word-of mouth. An illustrative case is that of an Indian client who bought an apartment and then referred to the agency 14 relatives who all signed deals. Their other way of reaching out to potential clients is much more contemporary but catches on just as fast – the Internet.

When Stanimirov was establishing the company, he first secured the domain www.imotibg.com. The name of the agency stemmed from there. This sequence of events is in some way prophetic because today the site gets about 3500 to 4000 individual visitors from Bulgaria a day, who view a total of 35 to 45 000 offers. About half of the visitors return to the site. Another 500 to 800 visits a day come from abroad, resulting in 10 000 to 15 000 pages views. Internet use results in 70 to 85 per cent of all deals.

Despite impressive numbers and its respected name, Stanimirov is low-key and ImotiBG’s atmosphere bespeaks accessibility. The company’s office – shared by all 12 employees – is in a first-floor apartment in a building near Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. The headquarters lacks the gloss and order of contemporary office premises, but compensates with a sense of community and lack of pretence. In some ways, it is reflective of Stanimirov’s philosophy.

“Regardless of where you are in your career, you should always return to where you began, so that you never forget,” he says. “I may be the CEO of this company but I work as an agent regularly. First, because I enjoy it. And second, so that I can understand what the people working here do, how their job changes, how the market develops. What I never want to forget is the time when I was an ordinary real estate agent on this market, where I started from and how. To look from the top is one thing, to be in the trenches is completely different.”

Staying in touch with day-to-day reality is key, Stanimirov thinks, because it is a way to secure quality of service. And that, he says, is what keeps people returning and referring.

“We don’t sell properties, we are here to help fulfill certain dreams and wishes of our clients,” Stanimirov says. “We don’t own apartments; we offer a service, and that’s our only asset, so to speak.”

Stanimirov says that he has seen too many clients who have been turned off by agencies because of poor communication style, lack of promptness and insufficient or inaccurate information.

“Many people would not make the effort to see an apartment if there are no pictures, a good and detailed description, a well-structured offer,” he says. “Precision of information is key, and I come down hard on my staff about that.”

When he recruits people, Stanimirov is not that set on knowing whether they have one or three higher education degrees. Agents are salespeople, he believes, and either you are born with the talent to be one or not. Plus, being an agent is being a psychologist, he adds. 

“You meet a client and you have to understand the central motive to their request,” Stanimirov says. “What do they need and why? Sometimes we work with people who don’t know or are unable to articulate what they want. We have to help them identify their need and the urge that brought them to us in the first place.”

Knowing that most of their clients buy to let, ImotiBG has also secured a leading edge by offering their services through the entire continuum.

“So they get the apartment and then starts the big tearing down of walls, changing the plumbing and so on,” Stanimirov says. “It all ends with the furnishing of the apartment, and then we find them a tenant.”

But he goes out of his way to make the distinction between offering the service to find tenants and guaranteeing rental profits.

“Of course we find tenants, but I prefer telling our clients realistic projections as opposed to promising them something that is questionable, even impossible,” he says. “This is a very misleading factor and unfortunately quite common on the market here. There are people who guarantee residential rental returns of, let’s say, 10 per cent. I find anything above 8 per cent a stretch, regardless of how wonderful the property or its location is.”

In Sofia, ImotiBG focus on two types of locations. One is the periphery of Sofia where neighbourhoods such as Vitosha, Boyana, Simeonovo and Manastirski Livadi have grown to be investors’ favourites. The other is central Sofia.

“We were probably one of the first companies to develop this market very rapidly and the majority of our clients in the past couple of years are buying exactly that type of property,” Stanimirov says. “Sofia did not attract interest among most foreigners before, save for the Irish, who are very interesting investors and appreciated its significance.”

Why Sofia, you ask. “Because there isn’t a capital in Europe where prices are not going up; this is what awaits us, too,” is Stanimirov’s answer, with an important caveat – the quality of residential properties has to improve.

He sees the government’s decision to drop business income tax from 15 to 10 per cent as well as Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union as drivers for international companies’ relocation to Bulgaria. Though the scenario has more immediate impact on the office market, residential properties will be in the radius of the ripple effect with foreign and well-paid domestic employees creating demand for luxury rentals in buildings with doormen, good shared facilities and ancillary services.

Although Stanimirov takes obvious pleasure in his work, he looks forward to the end of the day, too, for that is when he can spend time with his wife, Boryana, and his three-month-old daughter, Alexa.

“It’s my biggest mistake,” he says, “that I am not always able to spend as much time and give as much attention to my family as I wish I could.”