BG Intel RealEstate
What you're actually buying when the building doesn't exist yet
Nearly a third of Bulgarian homes are sold before they exist. The discount is real — twenty to forty percent off a finished apartment. What nobody explains is that until the building is done and the documents are issued, you do not own anything: you hold a contract to fund a project, on terms that can move. I built Pocket Broker after a developer left my grandmother's building unfinished and our family paid to complete it — and after every agent and lawyer I hired told me not to worry.
- Role
- Solo — research, product, full-stack build
- Timeline
- 2026
- Focus
- Public-records intelligence
Tech Stack
- 30–40%
- of big-city housing sold off-plan — industry estimate, no official figure exists
- 3,447
- companies and people mapped in the ownership graph
- 5,932
- ownership and management connections, each carrying its source
- 445
- official court acts attached to the companies behind the brands
A look inside
01 — The Problem
Buying off-plan puts you in the worst seat in the deal. If labour or material costs rise, the contract can change and you pay more. If the market moves, the developer can cancel at the last moment, hand your money back, and sell your apartment to someone else at the new price. You carry an investor's risk with none of an investor's protection, and you carry it for years. Then there is the structure. Bulgarian developers register a separate company for each building, so permits, mortgages, pre-sale contracts and lawsuits all attach to that one project company — never to the brand on the billboard. Search the brand and it looks clean, because it is clean. One well-known developer resolves to ninety-seven companies once you expand the people behind it, and the litigation that matters sits on a project company connected to the parent by a single shared owner. Nobody checks. Not the state, not the agents, not the lawyers — I asked all three.
02 — The Solution
Every source is public. Assembling them by hand takes an ordinary buyer about a week, which is why nobody does it. Pocket Broker does it in minutes, and it does it in layers, because no single register tells you the truth. It starts at the official commercial register and maps the brand out to every company its owners control. It runs the official court database against each of those companies and the people who run them. It checks the register again for a freeze on a partner's shares — enforcement handled by a private bailiff, which means it never reaches the court portal and a company under active pursuit reads as clean everywhere else. Press and buyer forums come last, and never count as official evidence. Overlay three to five sources and you can finally see who is on the other side of the contract.
03 — How It Works
From idea to finished result.
- 1
Resolve the company
The brand in the brochure is never the registered name. Start at the official commercial register and pin down the real entity, its status, capital and owners.
- 2
Map the network
Expand every owner and manager to all the companies they control. One brand routinely becomes dozens — the record you want is never on the one you searched.
- 3
Search the courts
Query the official court database by company ID and by company name, then union both passes. Neither is a superset of the other.
- 4
Check enforcement
Look for a freeze on a partner's shares. It is the most serious distress signal available, and it is invisible to the court portal and to every commercial aggregator.
- 5
Layer and decide
Add press and community reports last, ranked below the official record, and read the assembled picture — with sources attached to every claim.
04 — Key Features
What it does.
05 — Why It Matters
A home is the biggest purchase most people make, and off-plan is the version where the buyer carries the risk and the seller keeps the options. The information that would even those odds is already public — it is just scattered across registers that were never built to be read together, and walled behind CAPTCHAs and anonymised listings that make joining them up genuinely hard. Existence is not guilt: companies litigate routinely, so the tool records that public acts exist as evidence to review and never returns a verdict. The point is not to accuse anyone. It is that you should be able to find out who you are dealing with before you sign, without spending a week to do it.
06 — Impact & Value
What it’s worth.
35 paid research orders
Real buyers ordered checks on real developers — 243 official court searches run across their company networks.
Two sides, one engine
Buyers pay to check a developer; developers with nothing to hide pay to publish their own record as a transparency certificate.
08 — What I Learned
Takeaways.
- That the most valuable signal is usually the one that is deliberately hard to join up
- How to model a family of companies as a graph — and why the edge matters more than the node
- To rank evidence by tier: an official court act and a forum post are not the same claim
- That a tool which accuses is a liability, while one that documents is infrastructure
Buying off-plan will always carry risk. It should be a risk you chose, not one nobody told you about.