Ready to dive into the wonderful world of Georgian real estate? We're chatting with Brian, the head honcho of real estate at Expat Hub, about all things property in Georgia. Whether you're eyeing Tbilisi, Batumi, or the surrounding areas, we've got the scoop on prices, growth potential, and the nitty-gritty details of buying here. Spoiler alert: rental prices have shot up like a rocket, and there are still some sweet deals if you know where to look! So grab your virtual tour guide and let’s navigate the exciting (and sometimes wild) real estate market of Georgia together!

Tom is joined by Brian, head of real estate services at ExpatHub to discuss the Georgian market - why buy in Georgia? Where in Georgia? And advice about the purchase process and common issues faced by buyers.

Show Notes:

Get a FREE Consultation: https://expathub.ge/free-real-estate-consultation/

Download our state of the market PDF here: https://expathub.ge/realestatepdf/

Neighbourhood Guide + Podcast: https://expathub.ge/living-in-tbilisi-georgia/

The Tbilisi Podcast dives deep into the exciting world of real estate in Georgia, specifically focusing on the hot markets of Tbilisi and Batumi. We kick things off with Brian, the head of real estate at Expat Hub, who lays down the law on property purchases. Imagine being able to snag a charming apartment in the heart of Tbilisi for under $100,000! Sounds like a dream, right? Well, it’s a reality here, and Brian breaks down how prices have surged lately, especially since the Ukraine situation stirred up demand. We chat about rental yields and how buying for investment purposes might just be your golden ticket in this blooming market. Spoiler alert: the rental prices have doubled in the past year, so if you’re just getting started, you might want to hop on that train before it leaves the station!

Next, we take a whimsical stroll through the neighborhoods. From Sabartalo to Vake, we explore where to buy, what to expect, and how to navigate the quirky Georgian property market. Is it a concrete jungle out there? You bet! But with a little patience and our expert tips, you can find a gem that feels like home. We'll even spill the beans on how to open a bank account and get legal residency just by owning property. How cool is that? So, if you’re dreaming of Georgian sunsets from your balcony, this episode is your must-listen guide to making it happen!

Finally, we wrap it all up with some savvy advice on handling the nitty-gritty of property transactions in Georgia. We discuss the importance of due diligence and the potential pitfalls of diving headfirst into the market without a safety net. Whether you’re a seasoned investor or a curious newcomer, we’ve got you covered with practical info and a few laughs along the way. Join us for a chat that’s not just informative but also sprinkled with a bit of humor and light-hearted banter. Who knew buying property could be this fun? So grab your headphones and let’s get started!

Takeaways:

• Investing in real estate in Georgia can be attractive due to low prices compared to other European capitals.
• In the past year, rental prices in Tbilisi have doubled, making it a hot market for renters.
• Foreigners can easily purchase property in Georgia, with no special permits required for residential properties.
• If you're planning to invest, be aware that building quality varies significantly across different neighborhoods.
• It's essential to conduct thorough due diligence before buying property to avoid potential pitfalls and scams.
• The property market in Georgia is still growing, but finding good deals requires patience and quick decision-making.

gamarjoba

This is the Tbilisi podcast, covering life, travel and more in the country of Georgia, brought to you by foodfuntravel.com, expathhub.ge and eat this tours.com in this episode, I am talking to Expat Hub's head of real estate about purchasing real estate in Georgia, whether in Tbilisi, Batumi or elsewhere.

We'll take a look at some of the most interesting places to buy, the sort of prices that you might be looking at, and some of the technical details that you might have to deal with during the purchase process. All that and more in this episode. Hello, welcome to another episode of the Tbilisi Podcast.

This is Tom here from expathub.ge and eatthisthistours.com and today it's very much an Expat Hub episode because we're talking about real estate. I am here with our head of real estate here at ExpThub.

We've got Brian on the show with me and he's going to be talking through all of the major details that you need to know if you are considering investing in the market in Georgia.

So we're talking about all of the basic overview about what sort of prices we're looking at these days, how growth has been in the market in general, places to buy, areas to buy, as well as getting into a little bit more detail into things like rental yields.

If you're looking to buy as an investment rather than to buy to live, then you're definitely going to be interested to know how well that investment is going to do. So we've got a bit of technical data, but also just a lot of conversation and chatting about generally the market.

So if you are not familiar with the market, then you're going to get a good overview of whether it's somewhere you may be wanting to invest. All right, Brian, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Tom. Good to be here.

Good. Glad you could make it.

Finally managed to bring you in and do a podcast because I've been trying to do this for quite a few months and it just hasn't happened.

You've been threatening me for a while with this.

Yeah, yeah.

So I forced you in front of a microphone and we're going to extract as much useful information about the real estate market in Tbilisi and a little bit around the rest of Georgia as well. So, yeah, it's not just Tbilisi. I guess we'll talk a little bit about the market in general.

There's definitely other places to buy and we'll talk about that as well.

So I think we should start off with just sort of like a three or four minute sort of introduction to all of the big headline issues about Georgia and the real estate market so we can get a general sense of whether it's something that might be interesting to them.

So what would you say is sort of like the main points, the main things that have happened over the last few years that would be essential to know if you're considering investing here?

Interestingly?

Well, aside from the past, the past 12 months, which has really been a very, very tumultuous time, I guess in the real estate market here due to the hostilities in Ukraine, which has really made massive differences to the prices and to the demand.

I mean, for instance, in the past 12 months we've seen rental prices have doubled across nearly all districts of Tbilisi and other major cities like Batumi. And then sales prices are hitting like +35 +40% depending on, depending on the district you're in.

However, historically, I think we need to, that Georgia in general is coming from a very low price base when you compare it to say, more mature, more developed economies that we might find in the West. And so for that reason, people traditionally, even up to four or five years ago, we're still looking at Georgia as a cheap place to buy.

I mean, Tbilisi is a European capital city. And when you compare property prices here to other European capital cities, it can still seem extremely good value.

There aren't too many capital cities in Europe that you can buy a 60, 70 square meter apartment city center for under $100,000 and you can, you can still do that here even. Well, maybe not 60, 70 now with what happened in the past 12 months, but certainly 40, 50 square meters and that's still available.

And for a lot of people that's extremely attractive.

We're talking about places that are right next to a historic city center.

And when we look at other parts of Europe where you've, where people have bought properties that, that, that are that close to an old city center, those price values just, they can shoot up in a very short amount of time. We're definitely not at the top of the curve at the moment in terms of growth potential, I assume.

Certainly not. But a lot of that does depend on, let's call them macroeconomic factors.

I mean, let's take for instance, when you're, when you're making comparison between EU capital cities and Tbilisi, the EU capital cities, the property buyers there are working off quite different financial projections in terms of the mortgage interest rates.

They're likely to be charged Here, which in Larry terms right now, if you're getting a mortgage in Larry, you're talking 10, 11% mortgage interest rates. In dollars it'd be maybe 5 or 6%. ECB rates and European Central bank rates are, you know, considerably lower than that.

And that interest rates, higher interest rates deflate a property market, Lower interest rates fuel a property market. So there is that differential at the moment.

That is one of the main reasons why you can still, particularly if you're a cash buyer or if you're putting a lot of equity into a property and you're not looking to fund a lot of that property with borrowed money, then yes, for sure you're getting good value here.

Okay, so yeah, definitely lots of good reasons to invest. In terms of potential growth, let's jump through a few other headline items before we get into some more details.

I would say let's very quickly talk about sort of the year over year growth.

Do we have any way to predict that considering how volatile the market was the last 12 months, do we have a rough estimate at how growth had been going before that and what it may sort of settle down to?

Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean honestly Tom, if I had a dollar for everyone that asked me what's going to happen in the next.

12 months, you didn't bring the crystal ball?

No, I didn't. No, I didn't.

And honestly, as I say to clients and they sometimes look at me a little bit strangely, I'd say like we, you know, hand and heart and being very honest with you, we don't know. And any firm, any company that tells you that they do know, they're not telling you the truth because nobody knows.

There's too many external factors involved.

However, what I can say is this, is that historically, going back a decade or 12 years in Georgia and in Tbilisi, rental yields were historically between 8 and 10% growth.

Those are the figures when the lockdown, the COVID lockdown happened here and everything shut down for a year, 18 months, maybe up to two years, the property market completely stopped. You couldn't do viewings. The sales volume went down to virtually zero at times whilst at the same time CPI inflation was there in the economy.

A certain amount of that is catch up. I can make a guess and put a figure on it, but it's, you know, I'm purely speculating.

I would say something like of that 40%, 15% of it was a catch up. Inflation, let's call it in the property market. And the rest of it. Yes, as a result of, of. Of the influx from Ukraine.

Interesting.

We'll get into talking a little bit more about what the prices actually are at the moment once we start talking a little bit more about the neighborhoods. Because I think it'll be a bit more context then so people understand where we're saying when, why it's that price.

So a couple of headline points just to quickly throw out there. If you're a foreigner looking to buy here, there is no restriction apart from on agricultural land.

So if you are planning to buy in one of the cities, most of that land is zoned for residential use or commercial use. Although surprisingly, some outer areas of cities actually are still agricultural. So you do have to look out for that.

You can't buy agricultural land as a foreigner, so that's a big one.

But otherwise, if you just want to come in here and buy property tomorrow, you don't have to get a special permit or do anything funny or be a resident like that. You literally can just come and purchase. So that does make it nice and easy if you're looking to do a.

Quick investment, and that's quite a big plus. And it surprises a lot of foreign investors and buyers here that it is actually that easy. They don't understand why it's so easy, but it is.

Yes, it's that simple. You can open a bank account here in 24 hours and you can literally, you know, view and close a property purchase within two or three weeks.

It's not difficult, miraculously. Well, not that miraculously because the expert hub team helped me.

But when I bought my property here, we managed to source the property, purchase the property and have the title transferred within 10 days.

Yeah, but you had a team of.

I had a team of people, you know that that team is here to help our customers as well. So of course I got a little bit of special treatment because I work here.

But yeah, if you tried to do that yourself.

No, no, I would take months. I would never have been able to do that myself.

It was because I was working with the team here and of course it made a huge difference and we never make that promise to our customers. That was a special case because I'm here every day with the team being like, could you can you do this, could you do this?

But yeah, for our clients, I think we're dep. How long that actually takes them to find the property they want and make a decision.

We're sort of looking at more like four weeks to 12 weeks, I guess is sort of typical.

We haven't had very many 12 week clients, to be honest.

Normally you can do it quicker than that.

Much quicker. The 12 week lines we've had had, we've had our clients that weren't really available for.

Weren't necessarily fully available to do viewings or that they might have had some difficulties with their funds. But generally from our side, yes, we can move very, very quickly.

Okay, I'm just going to cover a couple of the other quick headline topics before we get into the meat of this discussion as well. One thing is the 0% capital gains if you've owned the property more than two years.

So if you buy the property, wait two years and then sell it, there's no capital gains on the profit. The annual property tax is a maximum of 1% of the total value of the property. So not too bad at all.

They don't have, I mean, in England we have like council taxes. We have all these various other taxes to pay when you live somewhere. They don't have that here it's just property tax.

Sure. And on the property tax, I mean, effectively it always works out at less than that. One percent is what is in the tax code of Georgia.

That's what the legislation says, that it cannot be more than 1% of the property value. And that's an important point. It's value, not the market price.

And it needs to be valued by an accredited evaluator to, you know, to get to come to that number.

Yep.

One other interesting quirk is not a quirk, but a legal rule is if you have a property that's valued over US$100,000, then you can actually get legal residency here just by owning the property without having to do a bunch of other paperwork.

There can be some hiccups on trying to do that, of course, but in general, if you meet the qualifications that you need to meet, then that works really well. We've helped a lot of people get residency that way. Also. One other thing that people ask us a lot about is bank accounts.

And I think we'll talk maybe a little bit about mortgages as well later if we get the time. Maybe you'll have to put that in a second episode. We'll see how we go.

But bank accounts, if you want to open a personal bank account in Georgia, so you can easily move the money that you're planning to use to make the purchase over here. That is also very possible. Most people find it very easy to open a bank account.

I know Russians have had some problems because, of course, the recent developments in Ukraine. Banks have been reluctant, but most other nations find it relatively easy to open a bank account.

I mean, I found it has become more difficult since I opened my bank account here a few years ago, but it has actually still been relatively easy for most people. A little bit of KYC onto where your wealth is coming from, and that's about it. And they'll open it. You didn't even need an address. It was weird.

You didn't need, like, a proper proof.

Of address, your passport, and that was it. You could. If you were staying in an Airbnb.

Yeah.

You could give that as the address of your bank account when you opened your account. And it's great because you could literally go in 24 hours later, collect your bank card, and that's it.

You have your bank account in four denominations.

Yeah. You know, completely crazy. Yeah. Very, very easy. Still, even now with the extra bit of KYC going on. I didn't know KYC at all.

They didn't ask me a single question about anything.

They just opened us is. Is standard proof of funds and source of funds. It's nothing. They don't. Don't. They don't really ask you to jump through hoops on that.

And it's all above board. The banks are professional in their dealings, so there's nothing risky there, really, from, you know, in our experience.

Yeah. I mean, the difficulties normally happen when you actually try to move a large amount of money.

Then they start asking you where the source of that money is coming from. And they might hold that money. So we might talk about that a bit later on.

But just as a general quick point, if you are planning to move that money over, you might want to start that process a little bit before the actual sale is being made, because you might find that you're held up for a week or two.

I would. And I would even say to people, if they're just here on holidays and it occurs to them that this might be a nice place to buy a property.

Maybe I'll come back in a couple of months and go into some more detail. Just go in and open a bank account. It's that simple.

Because then some work is done and then if you need to, or if you want to purchase remotely, then afterwards, then it can all be done. Through POA and you've got your local bank account all ready to go. It's, you know, it makes it much easier.

Yep, super easy. You can get your power of attorney while you're here. It's significantly easier than doing it.

Whilst if you're trying to do it from abroad, you need a postal passport and other documents. If you do it here, you literally walk into the notary office and you can get someone signed up as your attorney with that. Very, very, very easy.

All right, so that's some of the summary. As we said, growth still, lots of potential, quite a few different perks relating to tax benefits and residency benefits and that sort of thing.

If you're buying in Georgia, some of the other biggest questions are the things we can move on to now, where to buy and what does it cost to buy in those areas approximately, and what sort of thing are you getting for your money? So let's start with Tbilisi. It's obviously the most interesting for most people, Beautiful old capital city. If you haven't visited here.

Lots of other episodes on this podcast talking about tourism things. So that's where you're going to want to find out about that information.

But yeah, there's a lot of property to buy, lots of newer apartments as you get further out of the city, as a lot of refurbished apartments inside the city and various other types of property. So there's quite a different range of things. So let's talk about a few of the suburbs and where people are looking at buying and what it costs.

Yeah, I think actually, Tom, I'm going to jump ahead there. I've got to jump back a little bit because I think what people need to ask themselves is why am I buying a property?

Yeah.

And that's really the answer they need to be very sure about before they decide on the district and the location in the city. Because if it's a buy to live and quality of life is important, then you probably don't want to be downtown in the noisy area.

But if you're buy to, if you're an investor, then that's maybe exactly where you want to be. But let's start like you said, let's start with. You mentioned the northern suburbs.

Yeah. So a lot of new apartments have been built outside of the real inner city sort of old town area I personally purchased in Sabatalo.

That's one area that's maybe a bit more bang for your buck. And then Varque is a little less bang for your buck. But it's also a very popular area and prestigious area.

So maybe you think those are two of the best ones for expats at the moment, or do you have some other opinions?

I wouldn't necessarily. They're the best for expats are certainly traditionally the most attractive places for expats.

Vacay is very much appeals to expats because of the wide boulevards, the new buildings, the cafe, restaurant culture. But it does have its drawbacks. The traffic is a nightmare and it doesn't have a metro station.

So in terms of ease to get around Vacay sometimes can be difficult. But, you know, the lifestyle there is great.

There's great restaurants, there's great bars, great cafes, and it's where you will meet for foreigners, it's where you'll make friends.

It's a lot closer to Western European style feel. I wouldn't say it's the same as Western Europe at all.

Don't imagine that you're moving into Paris, but they're aiming to be more like that in that one suburb compared to everywhere else.

Yeah, and honestly, it's for me at this stage, and I'm fairly not as well traveled as you are, Tom, but I've traveled quite a bit. It's clean, it's very well maintained. It's a beautiful part of the city. The air is clean. There's no doubt about it that it's, you know, you don't.

The roads are swept every day. The footpaths are spotlessly clean. The gardens, the green strips, the flowers. Everything is kept very, very well there.

And it is very close by taxi to downtown Rustic Valley.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, aside from the bottleneck of getting in and out with the traffic, because the roads do need a little bit of improvement.

I mean, they're very clean, modern roads that they replaced, but they still just don't have enough roads for the amount of traffic that's going in and out. But aside from that, that one thing, it is actually still very centrally located.

So once you're out of that traffic, you're in downtown in sort of 10 minutes after you leave Vacay.

But it's not cheap, you know, but it's not cheap. And something to consider and in all districts of Tbilisi is the range of building quality.

And it's something that's worth having a quick couple of minutes on is that people will look online or they'll do some research and they'll say, okay, the average property price is in Vacay. Oh, it's just, you know, $2,000 a square meter, but that's average from top quality buildings right down to the lower quality buildings.

And if you're seeking a high quality building, and if you're seeking a high quality western residential tower like you're used to, that $2,000 a square meter just doesn't apply. You can easily pay three, three and a half, even up to $4,000 a square meter in Vacay.

Yeah. And those sorts of places we're talking about, they've got concierge desks at the front. You know, the lobby is perfect, everything's finished.

Because that's another thing you're going to spot like the public areas in some of these places that are cheaper are just not finished and they're probably never going to be completely finished. You're going to have, you know, wires hanging out and bare walls.

So if you want that lower end of the spectrum, you can still have a very nice apartment that's finished inside in a really good location, but you're not going to have all the bells and whistles that you get with those fancier apartments.

True. And I suppose the difference between Vacay and the other districts is Wache just has a higher proportion of the new modern tower blocks.

I mean, there's a lot of them in Sabartalo, they're down in some newer ones in Matsminda and some are in the more outer suburbs. They're just a higher concentration of them in Vacay, I think. And then in terms of building quality, I mean it's.

We surprise a lot of our clients because they will, you know, I saw this advertisement, you know, they'll send us the link and we look at it and it's this beautiful interior pictures of an apartment. And then we will do a preview.

We'll drive up to the apartment building outside and then send them back some photographs and they're going, oh no, no, no, no, not there, not there.

Some horrible old Soviet building that looks like it's falling apart.

They are.

But what most people don't understand is after living here for a couple of years of, you know, for some years, a lot of these, you know, old looking dilapidated residential blocks house some very, very nice apartments. There's no two ways about it.

Yeah, yeah, there's a. I don't know if you ever watched that show with Carl Pilkington when he travels around the world, but he had this strange perspective on Petra.

Yeah, on Petra, Indonesia.

He said, yeah, you know, why would I want to live in this amazing Petra building and look at some horrible rock wall when I could live in the horrible Cave and look out the window.

So you know, you're inside your beautiful place and you're looking at the beautiful world around you and you can't see the horrible building you're living in.

There's something to be said for that. Particularly if we talk about some districts, like say for instance Avalabari on a.

Hill, great views, amazing views from there.

Type buildings.

Yeah.

And if you like vintage, you like quaint, then that might be a good option.

Yeah. Views of the city, views of the mountains. You're not having a view of your own apartment block. So you know, why do you care?

Exactly, exactly.

But still. Yeah, it depends what your budget is and depends what you're looking to achieve, as you said.

So if we're talking about buying to live, then we're, we're saying that Varque and Sabartalo are good options.

They are the most popular. And certainly Sabur, I mean, I mean, Tom, Sabartalo is a huge district. I mean Sabartalo has how many, four metro stops.

Yeah, yeah. It's long, you know, to drive from one end to the other even without traffic is like 20 minutes or something.

There is a big difference in building quality. I mean, you know, if you're down close to the Hippodrome Central park area, you know, there's a lot of new development on University street there.

There's a lot of development right in the northern part of Sabartolo up around Lissy la. And then you've got some older type, more of the Soviet tower blocks up on Nutobice Plateau that mightn't be so attractive.

But again, let's use the Petra example. You've got great views of Tbilisi.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So let's, let's throw a few ballpark figures out there.

There is certainly in older buildings, in the newer buildings you'd be hard pushed to find something for less than that. I'm not saying you wouldn't.

What's happened, I suppose really because of the huge demand in the past 12 months is that it's not as easy to find, let's call it low hanging fruit.

Yeah.

And, but you know, with some patience and if you've got a real touch on the market and you're looking at it every day and you can run out there and view and you're ready to close immediately, then yes, you can. But if you're taking your time with it, then you're going to find that very, very difficult.

Yeah. Okay. And then the difference in price for Sabartallo is sort of 20 to 30% lower.

For a newer building in Sabartalo, you're looking at minimum $1,500.

That's a finished apartment.

Finished, ready to rent.

Yeah.

Are ready to live in. You'll be looking at that.

And of course, these numbers, whenever you're listening to this podcast, these numbers could be massively out of date. They could be out of date in a few weeks. We don't even know. The market changes a lot.

To put an upper limit, even for me to put an upper limit on VACC is quite difficult because there are certain address vacay and certain developments there that you may pay up to $5,000 a square meter, you know. But we're just talking about averages in new buildings here. If we talk about older buildings, then, yes, we can take.

We can probably take a good 25%, I suppose, off most of the figures.

Yeah.

Particularly the minimum ones.

Okay. So, yeah, I mean, the best thing to do for pricing, really, because as we said, it changes a lot.

We're going to throw a few ballpark numbers out there, but there's no point in paying too much mind to the exact numbers as things do change is to take a look on the website.

You can head over to experthub.ge realestatepdf right there you can, if you put that all in as one word, you can download our sort of State of the Market PDF, which we keep updated periodically with new information. Also, there's a few articles on our website and we'll mention a bit more about those later as well.

But yeah, jump onto experthub.ge and type in real estate and you'll find all the different articles on the search button. So that's for. If you're planning to live here. Those are some good areas to consider.

There's a couple of other areas to consider perhaps as well, depending on what you're into. I mean, I like Ortachala as well. As we said, Avlabari has great views, even though some of the buildings are a little bit older. Marginishvili area.

Cugaretti on the other side of the river.

Very, very nice. Marginishvili particularly. It's lovely. But again, davidh Manishpeli Avenue it's been. All the facades have been refurbished.

But again, in terms of quality of life, in terms of proximity to amenities, in terms of a cafe, restaurant culture, margin is really, is not a bad option. And again, it's a 15 minute walk to the center of the old city. You can walk over to the dry market, the flea market and the river.

You're very, very close by. Honestly, it's one of my favorite parts of the city myself, I visit it regularly, but I don't. I live in Sabers.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, I think for the ease of access to the city in terms of things being walkable and the bang for your buck on that side across the river and the prices are a little bit more reasonable than stuff on the west bank.

So.

Yeah, that east side of the river, along the river strip, you can also.

I guess I put it on a par in terms of prices per square meter with Sabartalo.

Yeah, but just significantly closer to the old town.

Significantly close.

Yeah. I mean, and Sabatalo. We love Sabatalo. I love living there. Some things are walkable, but it also feels a bit like a stretch of repetitive.

The same building. Building. The same building, the same building.

It's a bit of a concrete jungle compared to other parts of the city, I think in Sabatali, but there's still plenty of trees around. It's just. It's a lot of high rises.

It is, but. And it also depends on what street you live on and what way the building and what way your apartment faces. I mean, you know, I live on. Not a.

Not a quiet street I live on. And it's. But it's nice and quiet for me. It's. I don't find this particularly noisy and it's clean. Yeah, I like it.

Okay, so we'll just very quickly mention a couple of other areas as well. Around Georgia. I think we talked quite a lot about Tbilisi.

We don't want to spend the whole episode talking about where to live because we have some other information about that.

We've got a neighborhoods guide on the podcast as well as on Expathub Ge, so you can read a bit more about these neighborhoods and see some photos as well.

But yeah, one area we didn't really talk about was sort of Sololaki Mutsminda and the old town, which is sort of like the more familiar for Airbnb type type, buy to rent sort of purchasing.

So maybe just a quick summary of those areas and any Other information, ballpark about pricing that could be useful and then we'll move on to some other parts of the country.

Looking at a price per meter squared basis, Matspinda is more expensive actually than vacc. Well, yeah, Ruster Valley because.

Mainly because Tom, you're in tourist central so you've got the highest short term rental demand there for investors so they can make their most from short term rentals and that drives up the price of property. Again, there's quite a mix in terms terms of, of building quality there.

Particularly around Mats Minda Solar Laki you'll still find the old Italian yard type. Italian yard type properties.

Yeah, these are these historic sort of heritage style buildings.

So yeah, they're timber framed and.

But if you're in a nice one with nice neighbors and it's nice and quiet, it can be lovely in terms of your quality of life and you've got very good rental demand. And Matzmanda Sololaki has the highest rental demand in Tbilisi, therefore in Georgia.

Yeah, yeah. And then the old town itself, I'm assuming these days it's a little hard to buy there.

Like a lot of the stuff's already been sold or are people flipping things after they've refurbished and then whacking the price up quite a lot.

Yes, they are Georgians that are.

I would never, how would I put it to you, I would never advise a first time buyer in the Georgian market to take on a project because you literally, you don't know what cost you're getting into and you don't know how long it's going to take and it can be quite frustrating. But if you're buying to invest, yes, you can find good options down there if you're buying to live.

Maybe I'm a little bit older, but unless you're under 30 years of age, summer times down there can be a little bit too noisy, a little bit too busy.

Yeah, I mean I remember before COVID just how crazy it was and that sort of thing is coming back this summer I'd have thought. And yeah, it's a lot of fun if you're going out and having drinks.

It does.

But if you go into the quiet, winding, quieter streets off the back of Sololaki, there's some nice, there's some lovely guest houses there, there's some nice Little terraced houses, there are some nice apartments.

But I think in these areas it's about patience and being ready to react and ready to buy, you know, as quickly as you can when the right property comes along.

Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I mean I love Salawaki, I live there as well.

Well, a lot of those buildings are older buildings and of course with that comes old building problems. Pipes may need to be replaced or may fail at any point. And you know.

Yeah, so there's lots of other things to think about compared to buying a new apartment further out in one of the suburbs. So yeah, all right, so that's lots of information about Tbilisi.

Of course, if you want to ask more about that, you can always book a free consultation with Brian.

If you head on to experthub.ge realestateconsultation all as one word, then you can directly book a call with Brian and he can talk you through some of the extra information that you might need, some specifics.

Let's talk as we said, a little bit more about the rest of the country, just briefly to sort of mention a few of the areas that you could consider buying in and then we'll try and move on to some of the more technical topics. So the second place that most people looking to buy is Bitumi. What's the summary on Bitumi? What's the market like there?

Right now the market is very strong. The coastline, the skyline of Batumi has just been transformed in the past 10 years.

It's modern sky, Modern sky won't call them skyscrapers with modern high rise glass buildings.

It's led by some high quality developers there, some of the larger hotel chains, some high qual that will offer guaranteed rental even on some investments. So the off plan market there is very, very strong. The traditional season there, it's not short.

The traditional summer season there runs from, you know, April to October. Last year it ran right through the winter and it's not all about that.

Also don't forget Batumi does have a beautiful old town too that reminds you a little bit of Marjaneshvili and it's very nice. There's good restaurants, there's good cafes. But don't think that it's a 12 month of the year coastal resort.

I mean I think March last year I think there wasn't there snow on the beach, yeah.

Also regarded as the wettest city in Georgia because it's right on the Black Sea.

More tropical, I suppose.

Yeah, I mean, it's technically it's a subtropical climate, so a lot of people do head there for the winter just because it is significantly warmer. It's going to be like 10 degrees warmer than Tbilisi, but that doesn't mean it's always 10 degrees warmer. The temperatures do fluctuate quite a lot.

And yeah, it can rain quite a lot during the winter as well.

In terms of prices, in terms of popularity of Batumi, it's very, very simple.

I mean, what's known as the first line in Batumi, which is the properties closest to the beach are the expensive, of course, then you've got what's known as the inner center, next expensive, then the suburbs and then the periphery. And those last two suburbs and periphery are kind of separated by main roads, so they're very easy to see.

But another thing really to consider when we're talking about Batumi is we have to just talk for a couple of moments about the infrastructure development that's going on in Georgia as a whole at the moment. I mean, there's.

The last time I read the statistics, there was over 800 kilometers of motorway being built with something like 40 or 50 tunnels, 40 or 50 bridges. So at the moment, you know. You know what it's like, Tom, to get to Batumi at the moment could take you five hours, it could take you eight hours.

Coming back on a Sunday evening from Batumi from a long weekend, it's an absolute nightmare. But within the next few years, suddenly that's going to drop down to three or four hours. And that cannot but help regional cities like Potumi.

Yeah, yeah. The transport situation from Tbilisi to both Pothumi and Kutaisi, which we'll probably mention shortly as well.

That new highway that's going straight through the middle of the country, when it's finished, it's going to be amazing. It's going to save everyone so much time from sitting in traffic that we currently do. So, yeah, I mean, that's another thing to consider.

Wherever you decide to live, the infrastructure is getting better. So whatever you're looking at right now, in a few years, time is going to be better than it is.

So, I mean, this is another reason why the market's growing, of course. It's just the country is improving overall.

Yeah, I know. Other things like Internet is improving everywhere.

The things like in the smaller villages, there's water mains, water going in everywhere, and overall there's an optimistic feel about Georgia now that you don't really see in a lot of other countries particularly. And let's not forget Georgia is still a developing economy. It's not yet 100% first world. It's somewhere between second and first world.

And I hope I'm not insulting any Georgians that are listening on that, but it still has some way to go. But Georgia has made great, massive strides in the past 10 years.

Yeah, a lot. A lot of progress, for sure. So, yeah, Pothumi is somewhere that a lot of people look at.

And then Kutaisi, not so many people looking at it, but I know some people will live out there. It's a little quieter. It's another large city. It's not large compared to Tbilisi, it's about 180,000 people.

But some of the big differences are that it's not loads and loads of traffic. Unlike Potumi, which has gone a bit traffic crazy, especially during the tourist season. And Tbilisi, which is just traffic insanity right now.

It's so much worse than it was a few years ago. There's just too many people living here currently. We have a lot of migrants from Russia, as you probably would be aware from the current situation.

But again, similar to Potumi, Kutaisi does have an old town.

Yeah.

Reminds you of Marjaneshvili. There are some good restaurants there. And Kutaisi is kind of a gateway to the northwest of the country too.

So, you know, it's on the way to Swanetti and Bestia and some of these absolutely beautiful mountainous regions.

And so if you are going away for a weekend to these kind of places, it's an idea to pop into Kutaisi and take a look at the place because it is an interesting city.

Yeah, I mean, Tbilisi and Kutaisi as well. I feel that the potential for day trips, if you live in these cities. Cities doesn't matter which one you live in, they've got different day trips.

But yeah, from Kutaisi you can go to Racha to the mountains, you can go south east to the wine regions. In Emoretti, you can go to Batumi in about two hours or it'll be less soon.

Yeah. And in the whole conversation, let's not forget about the skiing resorts and the winter resorts.

That there's Bakuriani, that's Gudari, and the infrastructure development investment that's going on at the moment will make those even more accessible. There's some really great winter resorts here. I mean, the. The World Freestyle Championships are going on right now. I Think in Bakhor Yang.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's a developing resort. It's not extensive at this point.

It's not going to be like some good Alpine resorts, but it's definitely improving and hopefully we'll see that improvement continue.

It's a lot cheaper.

I mean, we're talking about $10 a day for a lift pass rather than whatever it is in Europe these days, like €100 a day or something. Crazy. I don't. Haven't been skiing in Europe. Freighters. Yeah.

I was in Gudhari last year. I met some French. I met a French family and they just couldn't get over.

It was a fraction of the price for them to come to Georgia on a skiing holiday, then to drive 60 or 70 km into the French Alps to go skiing. It was cheaper for them.

Yeah, yeah. The flights and everything as well. And of course, Ktaisi has an international airport there which has a lot of connecting flights to Europe.

So direct. Direct flights. Whereas Tbilisi, a lot of the time you have to connect through Turkey. Yeah, through Turkey or. Or somewhere else.

There's not that many direct flights, especially not to smaller destinations in Europe. But yeah, so, okay. Lots of different possibilities there.

And beyond that, I mean, we could talk for hours about all the other places that you could potentially live in Georgia, but those are sort of like the three main cities where, you know, the properties will be zoned as residential.

Well, zoned as non agricultural.

Yeah. Not any non agricultural.

And when you get into the smaller.

And there's some beautiful, you know, some old quaint villages and towns around Georgia, but if you're looking at those and you're looking to buy, you make sure to take a look at the property extract and understand whether it's basically the smaller towns and smaller villages, the properties you're looking at are more likely to be zoned as agricultural.

Yeah.

And currently we don't really take on those projects, I don't believe, unless the policy's changed, because those agricultural land projects are significantly harder to actually make the purchase. You have to work through quite a few different legal matters to get even close.

There are. But. And quite simply, a lot of. If you're not a Georgian citizen, you can't buy.

Yeah, yeah. So you have to get someone to buy on your behalf and set up lease agreements and all these sorts of things.

So it can be done, but I believe it's not really something that your department deals with currently.

We can advise a little bit on it and we do have clients who, you know, really do want the countryside bliss. They want that quality of life and they found a property that suits them and they really, really want it.

And they have done, you know, long term lease agreements with the owners.

But the issue with that is that you, a lot of the time you're paying a freehold price price for a long term lease agreement and the resale value immediately has dropped from what you've paid for it.

And this is where unless you really are determined to stay somewhere for, I suppose, retirement or for a very long term basis, then it's something that you should question yourself on.

But of course the prices in the countryside are so low that it might be completely worth doing cheaper than renting somewhere. In fact, in some cases it could be.

And the planning processes is not particularly difficult. It's a three stage process to build. It's not particularly difficult.

You just need to make sure you've got a good architect who knows the municipality offices and the city hall very well of the, where you know the municipality that your, your property or your plot of land is located in and then a good builder from there. But yeah, it's just a number of people that have a number of clients that have done that.

Yeah, yeah. Now good point.

To move on, let's talk a bit more about the actual process of making a purchase because there's a lot of moving parts to getting this to work. You can read a lot of stories online, you can read a lot of hearsay and some of it's true, some of it's not.

There's a very large range of possibilities of what's going to happen to you during this purchase process. All the way from the first place you walk into.

You're going to meet some crazy Georgian guy who's the seller and he's just going to be like, yeah, sure, just bring me down $100,000 in cash tomorrow and we'll do the deal at the service hall. And you go, wow, that was easier than I thought it was going to be.

All the way through to the horror stories, which of course we hear a lot of the time and we, we often end up dealing with clients who've gone through a bit of the horror story themselves and then have gone, well, I've had enough of that and we're trying to help them with it.

So yeah, all the way through to people just straight up telling them misinformation about the property that they're actually going to purchase, finding out that there are various problems with technical problems like legal problems with the purchase that are going to cause Issues with them actually making that purchase. Purchase all the way through to. Well, I don't know, there's millions of them, really. We've got a whole article about some of the scams.

You can actually read that on our website. People get. They think they're buying something, they think they're going into one sort of deal and then they find out that it's not like that.

And these are all problems that are associated with an unregulated market, which is what we have here in Georgia. There is very little regulation. Anyone can be an estate agent. Anyone can take you around and sell you a property. So let's talk about the process.

And I think we'll probably encounter some of the problems with the process as we go through that process and the sort of the general timeline takes for people to buy it. And we can make some comments on all of those, give people some tips as well.

Yeah, I mean, rather than talk about scams, let's talk about the. Let's call them the idiosyncrasies of the market.

Yeah, yeah.

Because these are.

Some of them are not scams at all.

No, no, they're not. And people necessarily aren't trying to scam you.

It's literally they're playing the hand of cards that they have and then trying to play them as best they can. Let's put it like that.

I think when you're looking for a property, and even from our side, when we're dealing with clients, by far the most effort, the most time consuming and most hassle part of the whole is actually doing the property search of actually finding properties that are real, that are available and that we have contact with the owner in who is ready to negotiate.

And by real, we should clarify here that we are talking about a lot of listings that are online are photos of properties that aren't actually for sale. That's one of the ones.

It's not even that some of them are just computer generated photographs of, you know, of. It's a bait and switch. You know, an agent maybe just wants your details. But that's not unique to the Georgian market, Tom.

No, sure.

That's not something that's unique here at all. You'd find a lot of duplicate advertisements online where agents would just copy and paste each other's listings, add a percentage to it.

And then really what's happening there really is that if you are interested in a property like that is the problem is that there's maybe at least one, if not two middlemen between you and the owner. And there Might be two or three agents involved there because they've just copied each other's listings.

And not only does it slow down the process, it doesn't necessarily mean that the correct information about you, the purchaser is getting through to the owner.

Yeah. And when you call these agents as well and you're like how many bathrooms does it have? And they'll be like, oh, it's three.

And then you turn up to the apartment and it's one bathroom. Because the agents don't actually know the information. They're copy and pasting other people's listings.

Sometimes they haven't even been to the property. And this does happen. But again it's something we're used to.

Yeah.

And it's something that we preview buildings before we bring a client there for viewing or before we carry out a full viewing.

Because like we mentioned earlier, you can have beautiful interior photographs and then you rock up to a building and it's just not what you were hoping it was going to be. So there's certain stages of filtering down in the property search that we've become quite good at I think.

And we were able to get it down to what we are properties that we are actually showing our clients. Clients meet all of their criteria and there's no surprises there.

And that really does shorten the whole time frame for them when it comes to the actual purchase themselves. But then if we get onto the actual purchase process itself, once our clients have our. I'm not, I'll even stop talking about our clients.

Once a general purchaser has a property that they're interested in and want to make an offer on it at that stage, then once a sale agreed is agreed with the owner, with the seller from that point on on, with good due diligence, with good legal support, you can close that very, very quickly, within the matter of a fortnight. And it can be quite hassle free and you can have the keys to your apartment, your property within two weeks after agreeing a price with an owner.

And I'm not saying that's best case scenario. That can be, you know, good to best case scenario.

You know, worst case scenario is there's a problem with the due diligence of the property, with the property extract. There's a lien, there's a mortgage on it. You know, there can be various obstacles can be put in your way.

As soon as you, you've shaken hands with the seller and you've got sale agreed, you're not over the line, you've got another two weeks.

Yeah, but of Course, for people familiar maybe with the US market, it takes a long time to close.

So here what we're saying is it can close very quickly, but also because of the lack of regulation, there can be things that are easily missed if you're not careful.

Yes, for sure, absolutely. But that's where you just make sure your lawyer is doing the correct due diligence on the property.

So the search actually doesn't go back that far.

And, and the public service halls here that hold the mainframe property registers, that hold all the property extracts, it's a very, very efficient system. It's all held on a blockchain. So you renew the latest extract and then a good lawyer will spot any difficulties with that.

Yeah, it's one of the benefits of the short history, I guess, that you don't have so much. Like they could start afresh. They started everything from fresh, pretty much.

And it was done in an efficient manner.

The public service halls are modern, they're up to date, they are good systems and been in the one in Kutaisi, I've been in the one in Batumi, they're not as big as the one in Tbilisi, but they're certainly as modern, efficient and as well run.

Yeah, the bureaucratic systems are significantly more streamlined than they are in some other countries. So it definitely does help speed up this process.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. I don't really have a whole lot more to say on that other than, you know, some details we could get into.

But suffice to say that as soon as you've agreed a price on a property, make sure your lawyer is ready to act on your behalf at that point. And yeah, congratulations. At that point you get the keys of your property. Property.

On the day of the transfer, when the property transfer transfers into your name as a foreigner, what essentially happens is that your name from your passport and your passport details are linked or put on the property extract. It's therefore in your name and at that point you are the owner.

So on the day of the close you're basically applying for the change in ownership that can be fast tracked to 24 hours. You pay a little bit more. But again, it's a cheap process.

And something to note here for foreigners or for non Georgians buying here, and a big surprise for a lot of people is there is no stamp duty. The purchasing process here is relatively cheap. You've got a property registration fee to make of 200, Larry. And essentially that's it.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's amazing, really.

So I did jokingly mention earlier that maybe you meet some guy at his apartment and a day later you're giving $100,000 in cash for his place. I was sort of joking, but I'm actually not joking because that really does happen.

So one of the things that I think we found in the past with clients is when the seller asks for cash payment of the property and people freak out quite a lot the second we tell them about that. So what do you think? What has been your position over dealing with a lot of these transactions overall?

What has been the reason that they've been asking for cash? And. Well, I know there's many reasons. And what have we done about it? And what can we still do about it? And should people be afraid of paying in cash?

Okay, the first thing to note on that is it's very, very clear in Georgian law that property transfers must be made in Georgian. Larry. That's. That's something we would always make sure that our clients were transferring into Georgia. Larry.

On the day of the close, a lot of the sellers don't like that. But unfortunately, if we're following the letter of the law, that's what we need to do.

Yeah. What I found was curious is that even the banks seem to think that you can pay in US Dollars.

I've had bankers be like, oh, you're a foreigner, you can just buy your property in US Dollars. But as far as our legal team figured out, that's not strictly the case, and it seems to be some sort of problem, but that's more of a legal episode.

So I don't want to get too much into that.

There is something down there around enforcement that it's very, very lightly enforced.

Yeah. So that's it.

So, I mean, what we're sort of saying here is if your bank, if you're trying to do this independently and your bank says, yeah, sure, pay in US Dollars, why not? We'll sort that out for you. That's not necessarily a good idea.

And it's a bit of a gray area currently still here so, yeah, if you are getting sort of bamboozled and pushed into paying in U.S. dollars, you're, you're taking your own risks and you're making your own choices.

At that point, if you do, just make sure you've got a paper trail. I mean, handing over a brown bag of cash is not. I mean, I don't, I wouldn't feel too comfortable about that myself.

But you simply get the paperwork back to support it, that you have handed it over and that it's in front of a lawyer, a notary, that it's stamped that you did actually give that person that money.

Yeah, yeah. So it's definitely not a cash in hand at apartment thing.

It's go and meet up at a notary and actually have documents signed to show that the transaction was made to make sure you are covered. Exactly, yeah, yeah, that's the main thing.

So it's less to do with the fear of the cash itself and more to do with doing it in a legal way and doing it in a technical way so that you don't have any problems later on.

And aside from the obvious security risks of going around with maybe $100,000 worth of cash in your pocket on your, you know, in a cab on your way to close a purchase, I mean, this is. Yeah, it's the.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want to go.

I mean, Tbilisi is one of the safest cities I think I've ever lived in. It's so safe here. It's wonderful. But yeah, don't be foolish.

All right, so we still got a little bit more time. What other sort of common problems do we face that we solve for our clients?

What other things do we run into where there's somewhat our office doing a whole load of work to fix the problem, so we keep it out of the client's hair. But of course, if you're doing it yourself, you may encounter it and have to deal with yourself.

You've got things like, things like utilities, you've got things. Like I said, once the property search is finalized, I mean, for any one. For our client to buy a property, we would shortlist 50 or 60 properties.

We would preview maybe 20 or 30 properties. We would carry out either virtual or in person viewing of another 10 or 12 properties.

So the amount of actual time that goes into that is absolutely huge.

And that's with our local knowledge and our people, our account managers, they're bilingual, Georgian, and they know the market extremely well to come and try to do that yourself as a foreigner. I mean, I've had clients who have, who have come to me, say that, look, I found a property and I just need some legal services to buy this property.

And I can see it's a bad choice and I can see that they're overpaying and by then it's kind of too late because they've already reached a sale agreed situation with the seller.

And I knowing in my heart that if you had just come to us, we would have got you a better property at a better price and we would have done all the legal work for you included in the price. And we include property inspections. And that is another thing.

I mean, as part of our service, we do have accredited people to go out and give a full property inspection report.

And what that report does is, number one, it will highlight any huge red flags like safety of the building or problems with the communications, as they're called here, which is, you know, your gas, electricity and water, and then highlight it any cosmetic problems that you should know about. But it's really there just to highlight any of the major issues.

And we have had clients where we've gone out, we've done the property inspections for them after a verbal agreement has been reached and we've advised our clients to pull out of that deal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's happened a few times.

I mean, the thing is that there are very few people in this country who actually use property inspection services before making a purchase. Georgians don't really do it, which to my mind I'm like, well, that's sort of crazy.

But when you live in a situation where no one is doing it, then you don't think to yourself, well, hang on, five years from now I could find out that there's a massive structural problem with the apartment and it's not even safe, let alone, let alone something else. And of course it doesn't happen in that many cases, but it has happened. That has been problems that are enough to pull out of a deal.

It doesn't, but it goes into a lot more detail. It gives the client a report of a client when they view a property, maybe they view it twice.

They're not going to go into the kind of detail and the kind of checklist and the kind of routine that a property inspector will. So they are able to see a report very, very clearly.

A lot of it, most of it obviously is usually just cosmetic, but they're cosmetic things that they maybe didn't realize and they didn't budget for. And it allows them to make a proper, informed decision and actually gives them a Repair list for when they buy it, what to get done, you know.

Yeah, so no, I mean it is very useful. The reports that we put out are quite detailed for that. Then obviously the people we're using are experts.

So yeah, that really makes a big difference.

It's just the peace of mind for me especially I think with sort of service is if you are that one person in the 5% of places where you really, really, really shouldn't have bought it.

And I think actually from our track record it's more than 5% of our clients have ended up going, oh yeah, you shouldn't buy that might be, I don't know, I don't know if we've got full statistics on that. But yeah, you don't want to be the one in the 5% and if you don't take up a property inspection then you never know. Could be you.

Yeah, well, property inspection is, it's just, it's just prudent and it's. We included yes for our client.

But again Expat Hub was founded to be with this slightly altruistic, you know, in mind and foreigners come here to Georgia and we take great pride in helping them to get through the market for sure and to not to, you know, to make good purchases and not to get. I don't, I don't like using that word scammed just to make ill informed purchases and ill informed decisions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, quite agree. Okay. So yeah, we covered quite a lot of the information there. I think there's probably a few other points. We are, we're starting to run out of time.

Maybe if there's any other. The really important bits that we can cover in this episode.

But as I said earlier in the episode you can also get on a call with Brian or one of his team by going to experub GE Realestate Consultation and there's a sign up form there and it's a no obligation call you can get on.

You can ask all the questions that we haven't covered in this episode and anything else that you want to know and get some sort of tailored personalized advice and there's no obligation to buy our service. These are information calls.

But if, if you see the value in it, which we hope you will, we think it's a very valuable service that cuts through a lot of the noise of the market here and does it in a way that sort of international best practice, then you. Yeah, yeah, we'll give you more information about that after the call as well. So yeah. Anything else you think that might be worth mentioning.

I would say at the moment the property market is still hot, it's still moving very, very quickly and there is still value to be had in the market right now. But it just like, like I said, the low hanging fruit doesn't really exist anymore.

You need to be patient and you need to be decisive when you decide upon a property. Having said that, once you do that then yes, you can still get great value in the property market here.

Great. There was one thing actually that I remember from earlier.

You were talking about getting a power of attorney if you're going to turn up to the country and you might want to buy later.

This is obviously something else that we do which I feel is some lawyers and such independent lawyers offer some service akin to this, but definitely not with as much depth and scope as I think think we do. But we do full remote purchasing services as well.

So if you're not even going to come to the country and you're just looking to invest money here, then Expert Hub can help you make that work.

I can give you numerous, numerous examples.

I can give you a recent example of a Spanish client who living in Hong Kong and wanted to make an investment in Tbilisi and literally flew into the country for two days, opened his bank account, signed the power of attorney with our lawyers, went back and everything was done, virtually everything was done remotely after that. And, and that was done in two or three.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It can't be that quick.

So yeah, that's the main core of what we're doing here at Expert Hub and the way we're trying to make it a bit of a difference to the market is.

Well, one thing that we pride ourselves on is that we sort of opened up the market to some extent in the way that we can access all of the market because we offer buy side services.

Whereas we discussed a little bit earlier about sell side agents, I don't think we use that term to describe them, but agents who work for the seller and represent the property on behalf of the seller are taking their commissions from the seller. They often cannot access the vast majority of the market. They can only access the few listings that they actually represent.

And half of the time they don't even represent them. As we said, sometimes they are borrowing other people's listings.

The market is dominated by independent, is, you know, it's unavoidable and a lot of the time it is unavoidable that you deal with. In representing our clients, we deal with real estate agents.

However, I think I can say that in over 75% of the purchases that we've made on behalf of our clients or we've represented our clients in. We managed to circumvent agents and go directly to owners and that makes it much quicker, much less hassle. And it also means actually.

Which is surprising. Well, not surprisingly, but it means that the price that our purchaser is paying is not loaded with a 3% estate agent fees on the other side.

Yeah.

So they're getting, essentially getting a 3% discount off the property that they would have had to pay extra if they had bought through a sell side agent.

And the owner feels that they're not dealing with the sales agent, they're dealing directly with purchasers. So for them they feel it's. You're taking a middle person out of the equation.

Yeah, yeah. And from that side, of course, that saving can often cover the majority of our fees on our side.

More than.

More than sometimes in some cases.

Yeah. And actually when you consider, Tom, our fees include all of the legal work, include property inspection.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it can actually. And as you said, somewhere around 75% of cases, it actually works out cheaper than doing it yourself.

I would. Yeah. Which is crazy.

Crazy but actually true. And I think we could provide statistics to both back that up.

Tom, that. Come on. That's why we're successful, that's why we have the business.

Because we've. Yeah. As far as we know, not many other people are doing anything like this in terms of a service. So yeah, we're very happy with it.

Not, not, not such an all encompassing services that would include everything from. I mean we literally.

Our lawyers will accompany you to the public service hall on the day of the closing and even afterwards as an add on, we'll make sure that, you know, we'll help with getting all the utilities transferred into your name and then expat hub tax and legal services after that. If you need your tax returns done, if you're renting it out, that can be done afterwards too.

Yeah, there's loads of stuff there. So I think that might be a good point to wrap it up. Yeah, we managed to keep it just under one hour, just barely. So thanks everyone for listening.

As I said, if you want to grab a call with Brian or one of his team at some point, head to expathub.ge realestateconsult. All one word, no hyphens or anything like that. Nice and simple. And just book a call set.

It's free, very simple. It's just a Zoom call. 30 minutes and I can run you through any questions you have. If you're prepared and you've got a list of questions, even better.

Get as much value from the call as you can.

Yeah. Whether you live in Georgia or never planning to live in Georgia and just want to invest here, then that's what these calls are for.

Pretty much anyone who's looking to invest in property.

Absolutely.

All right, Brian, once again, thanks for joining me on the show. Finally got you on here, which is fantastic. Fantastic. Lots of information in there and hopefully we'll hear from some of our listeners soon.

Yeah. Okay. Thanks very much, Tom.

All right, thanks again for listening to the Tbilisi Podcast. We'll be back with more episodes very soon, so do keep listening and I'll speak to you on the next one. I won't see you.

I always say I'll see you on the next one and realize that I won't actually see you because I am currently just seeing Brian over a microphone and I won't be seeing you very much. But you know, if you come to Georgia, maybe I'll see you in person. It who knows.

Good to speak to you.

See you next time. Thanks for listening to the Tbilisi Podcast.

Connect with us@foodfuntravel.com TbilisiPodcast where you can find all relevant social media links, join our email newsletter and discover more about travel tours and expat services in Georgia. This show was brought to you by foodfuntravel.com expathub.ge and eatthistours.com.