If you are planning to move to Georgia, chances are you are planning to live here for some time and if you like it you may want to purchase some real estate – a property to live in (and avoid throwing money away on rent and dealing with landlords). Or some investment property, especially on the black sea.
Be ready, as this is the biggest challenge you are going to face in your Georgia life journey. Let me describe some issues you will be facing.
Real Estate “Agents” or lack thereof. If you are coming from a Western country – forget about what you know. There is no regulation here, and majority of local “agents” browse owner-posted real estate listings on local real estate sites, copy and paste the content to their own ads and if you reach out to them instead of the owner – will go to owner and ask for money because “they are bringing a buyer”. This is why you’ll see multiple listings for exactly the same property. To avoid these, most sites allow to filter by owner only.
There are a few legitimate agencies that have exclusive agreements with owners – these are OK to deal with. Usually the case for more expensive properties.
If your situation is simple – you want to buy an apartment – figure out where you want it and see if you can deal with property owners directly. Apartments have no land and therefore considered “non-agricultural” and can be purchased by foreigners.
And here we approach the biggest problem from my point of view. By Georgian law, foreigners (non-citizens) cannot purchase properties that are marked “agricultural” in the system. For some reason most Georgia-related sites mention it in passing like it’s not a major issue. Well, it was a major issue for us.
You can check this status by entering cadastral code of the property here: https://www.my.gov.ge/ka-ge/services/5/service/176
If you think “no problem, I am not buying a farm” – think again. Any property that has “any” amount of land attached is considered “agricultural” by default. This includes all stand-alone houses and even some townhouses with land. You as a foreigner cannot buy these. 99+% of houses on local market are agricultural.
You in theory can “lease” agricultural properties, but you do not own them in conventional sense of the word, and cannot for example get residency permit based on property purchase for them. Only for properties you actually buy outright.
In order to convert a house from “agricultural” to “non-agricultural”, owners need to follow a very expensive (thousands of $) and complicated process, with no guarantee of a positive approval from the government. While this was easier to do before, last couple of years it has become extremely difficult if not impossible. If a seller tells you “I have a perfect house for you, with a minor issue of it being agricultural, but we can easily convert it” – they are lying. I was tracking a house where owners applied, and 4 month later still did not have approval, after multiple rounds of providing additional paperwork to the government.
Don’t rely on Facebook posts either, I had a post absolutely clearly expressing interest only in a non-agricultural property, and all 20+ people who replied had agricultural properties to sell. They just don’t get it.
My advise to find an actual non-agricultural property and deal with local agents and sellers without scams successfully, is to get a paid buy-side agent (that you will pay to represent you in dealing with all that mess). According to my personal experience this worked well. We spent around 4 months reviewing 130+ properties, and my agent personally talked to representative of a single one of them, so you’ll get great value for the money spent. From that list of over 130 houses, only 4 (four) were really non-agricultural and we ended up buying one of them.
Another challenge: beware of a difference between actual property cost and assessment value. Housing prices increased considerably over the last 3 years, and comparables may be lagging behind a lot. If you are planning to apply for Temporary Residence Card based on a real estate purchase (over $100k temporary and $300k permanent), I highly recommend paying a few GEL (<100) for a property appraisal before you buy it, to avoid any surprises later. My property for example was appraised 35% lower than I paid for it. I used https://livo.ge/ for the appraisal, took 3 days to get it.
Useful links:
Property status check: https://www.my.gov.ge/ka-ge/services/5/service/176
Government maps (can find property location by cadastral code, enable cadastral data display layer to do that) https://maps.gov.ge/map/portal
Property assessment (which I used, there are others): https://livo.ge/
Real Estate sites I found most useful:
https://www.myhome.ge/en/
https://home.ss.ge/en/real-estate