The Russian President, Medvedev announced in his recent budget address last month that Russia had to start raising local taxes on property. The goverment is thinking about implementing a unified property tax, and if this goes ahead then an initial pilot scheme will be imposed in up to six Russian regions in order to assess its efficacy. The plan is to replace existing property and land taxes with just one single tax, and prepartions are being made to introduce it at the end of 2012, and to begin collecting it from 2013.
The plan is to use simplified methods in order to estimate the market value of buildings affected by this scheme, as the deputy finance minister, Sergei Shatalov thinks it would be unfeasible to determine the individual value of each property. Property owners will have the right for an appeal if they disagree with the valuations. Another aim of this new property tax is to redistribute the tax burden amongst citizens so that expensive property now costs more in tax. The finance minister sees nothing sees nothing wrong with this new scheme and feels it is simply social justice.
The situation for foreign owners is complicated too. They may view things slightly differently, especially if it is problematic for overseas investors to appeal against potentially unfair valuations. In theory buying a property in Russia should be relatively straight forward, as foreigners are granted the same rights as locals. It is still common for many property transactions to be competed in cash, with the money being placed in a bank vault and only being released to the vendor upon confirmation that the property has been transferred into the new owner’s name.

For this reason much the Russian pensioners (and not only) search home abroad with lower price level and the tax. Russian, now make a 90 percent piece of all Bulgarian property has bought now according to research from the end of summer 2011.