Effectiveness of the Use and Management of Municipal Real Property in Bulgaria

The paper provides an assessment of the effectiveness of the use and management of municipal real property (MRP), using data gathered through 173 questionnaires, addressed to representatives of 39 municipalities in Bulgaria. The paper is structured as follows: The first section gives information about the municipalities and is based on the following criteria: evaluation of the conditions in the cities; appraisal of the financial situation of the municipalities, the main sources of funding, and the sources that should be used in order to improve the their finances; existence of the relevant planning instruments, etc. The second section focuses on MRP and refers to criteria such as: rating of different aspects of MRP; existence of MRP inventory, municipal strategy and municipal unit dealing exclusively with MRP; evaluation of the selling values and the level of actual MPR rents in comparison to market rents; outsourcing of MRP management functions; assessment of the interdependence between different units of the municipalities; analysis of the focus of the attention of the elected decision makers. The paper ends with some conclusions concerning the identified problems in the process of MRP management in Bulgaria