Turkish house sales drop 14% as prices double

IMAGO/Daniel Scharinger via Reuters Connect

• Cost of living crisis bites
• Mortgaged sales ‘non-existent’
• Ankara prices up 106%

House sales in Turkey during the first 10 months of 2023 were down by 14.3 percent year on year to just under 1 million, according to data from the Turkish Statistical Institute.

Pressure on Turkey’s housing market has been exacerbated by the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, high inflation and an influx of displaced people from the devastating earthquake that hit the country in February.

Between January and October this year mortgaged house sales in Turkey dropped by 31.2 percent compared with 2022 to 166,461. 

• Turkey sees 81.8% surge in foreign homebuyers
• Turkish home sales drop by 44% after earthquakes
• Construction workers on the up as Turkey rebuilds

Zeynep Sinem Konca, head of valuation and advisory for CBRE in Turkey, said: “Due to banks narrowing their credit taps and high-interest policies, the chance of buying a house using a mortgage is almost non-existent.”

First time house sales decreased by 13.6 percent (297,827), while second-hand house sales were down 14.6 percent (696,008).

The residential property price index increased by 95.9 percent in June from a year earlier, as per an August report from Turkey’s Central Bank.

The index recorded an increase of 4.8 percent on a monthly basis, according to the data.

The average unit price of a house was 24,598.6 Turkish liras per square metre in June.

House prices in Istanbul increased by 85.1 percent from a year earlier. Prices were up 106 percent in Ankara and in Izmir prices climbed 100 percent.

Turkish annual consumer price inflation dipped for the first time in three months to 61.36 percent in October.

House sales to foreigners in the 10 months of the year so far decreased by 44.4 percent to 30,599 compared with the same period of the previous year.

In October itself, Russian citizens bought the most property at 713 houses, followed by Iranians (235), Germans (152) and Ukrainians (138).