It's a bit tricky market with peculiarities based on local mentality, high capital gain taxes, constantly depreciating Turkish lira, and different regulation of real estate agencies, if at all. Once you learn those specifics, might be easier to get into. But I've been studying it for a year and still don't have a very good confidence. The reasons I've been doing so are that the Turkish economy is growing, but most importantly, the population of both Turkey and İstanbul is growing, and Istanbul is the largest city that concentrates many businesses, its a large tourist attraction, and will have the largest financial center moving from Ankara. I have listened to podcasts, worked with and learned about market from local RE agents, but they are not consistent with information. They pursue their goals, so they might exaggerate or downsize it based on their interests. Surely, those investors who invested 2-3 years ago and earlier have a good appreciation in hard currency. But you make profits when you sell. In Turkey unless you hold a property for at least 5 years, the capital gain tax is 30-35% (per local sales agents). On a positive side, after 5 years you don't pay any of it. The following information is from RE sales agents. They say that every single year the property's value depreciates because the banks' valuation of property, which may differ for some reason from the market value, goes down every year, so the local buyers, who are most likely to buy, have less financing from banks for "older" buildings. So REA's insist the most profitable is to invest in new constructions at the start, despite those might be priced higher than the finished projects or 1-2 years olds or older nowadays, due to similar supply chain problems and global inflation, and sell them upon completion of construction. Sounds nonsense to me, but they persuade. Another problem is with the value of property in the title deed, which is almost always much lower than selling price for two reasons: 1) as mentioned above, sellers do not want to pay capital gain taxes if holding property up to 5 years, and due to high inflation the difference between the sales price and title deed price 3-6 times or even higher, 2) even if sellers hold a property for 5 or more years and can show full sales price, the buyers do not want to pay higher transfer tax, which is 4% of the official sales price in the title deed, so they might prefer to hold that price in the title deed. So, the sellers of the second hand properties always request to wire the smaller amount indicated in the title deed and pay larger portion of the sales price in cash. In the end, it might work well for Turkish residents who earn and invest in liras, but I am hesitant, despite being confident that the market in İstanbul has a growth potential in USD.
