Closing costs here are small — and the seller usually pays the agent

Buyers arriving from markets where the state takes a percentage of every sale tend to budget for a tax that does not exist here. A Georgian purchase carries no property transfer tax and no stamp duty. That single absence is worth more than most of the fee savings people chase: in several European and Gulf markets the equivalent charge runs into several percent of the price and is payable on the spot. What remains are service fees — registration, notarisation, translation, and whatever professional help you choose to hire — and those are modest by comparison.

Title registration at the Public Registry runs on flat government tariffs tied to processing speed rather than to the price of the property. In practice that means a cheap flat and an expensive one cost the same to register, and the only variable you control is how quickly you want the title in your name — standard service at the low end, same-day expedited at the top, which one worked example puts at around USD 100. For a buyer this inverts a familiar assumption: there is no saving to be had by registering a lower figure, because the figure is not what the fee is based on.

The agency commission is normally the seller's charge, typically in the low single digits as a share of the price. A buyer pays a commission only where they have engaged their own buy-side agent under a separate contract — which is a legitimate thing to do, and worth doing where you are buying remotely or outside your own language, but it is a cost you choose rather than one the transaction imposes. If a selling agent asks you for a fee on top of the seller's, ask which contract it arises under before you agree to it.

New-build property bought from a developer carries 18% VAT, but it is already inside the advertised price rather than added at signing. That is the opposite of the pattern in several markets where the headline number is pre-tax, and it is why a developer's price and a resale price are not strictly comparable on their face. Ask for the breakdown in writing anyway. A quoted price that turns out to exclude VAT, or a contract that moves the tax onto the buyer, is a different deal from the one on the brochure, and the place to find that out is before the deposit rather than after.