The Turkish Real Estate Market
607 properties, $150K to $50M, and some context for reading them. Türkiye's property market is unusual among European destinations in how much of it is driven by domestic demand, how young the housing stock is, and how much the currency does to any figure quoted in it. Those three facts explain most of what confuses first-time buyers here.
Who is actually buying
Overwhelmingly, Turkish people. Foreign purchases are a visible and commercially important slice of the market but a small share of total transactions, and that is the single most reassuring fact about buying here — the market does not depend on you. It is also the most useful test to apply to any individual development: if the domestic market buys in this building, there is a resale bid underneath you.
Among foreign buyers the mix has shifted repeatedly over the last decade, between Gulf, Russian, Iranian, European and Central Asian demand, largely following visa policy, currency and events elsewhere. A development that sold entirely into one of those waves can find itself with a very thin secondary market when the wave moves on. We say so when we see it.
A young housing stock, and why it matters
A large share of Turkish urban housing has been built or rebuilt in the last twenty-five years, driven by growth and by the post-1999 rebuilding of the earthquake codes. For a buyer this means the practical questions are different from those in an old European city: construction year is a meaningful proxy for structural standard, and urban renewal is an ongoing process rather than a historical one.
It also means the new-build market is enormous, competitive, and variable. There are developers with twenty years of delivered projects and there are developers on their first, and the price difference between them is smaller than the risk difference. We only market off-plan from the former, and we will show you their previous phases rather than a render.
The currency question, addressed rather than avoided
Turkish property is quoted internationally in dollars and euros and rented domestically in lira. That gap is the reason a headline rental yield can look strong and translate to something ordinary, and the reason two people can disagree about what has happened to prices while both being right — in different currencies.
We quote in the currency you are buying in and we model income the same way. Anyone showing you a return without naming the currency of each side of the calculation is showing you a marketing number. For how we apply this to specific properties, see property investment in Türkiye, and for the ownership costs behind any net figure, the cost of owning here.