Turkish Property: a Look Back at the Last Couple of Years

Many people expected a severe downturn in the the Turkish property market in 2009, and who could blame them? Turkish property is fuelled by tourism, and tourism was dropping drastically as we ended 2008 with predictions that 2009 would be a very bad year indeed for global tourism. The fear was realised, but fears over the Turkish property market in 2009 were most certainly not.

This is mainly because the UK fell into the crisis faster and harder than the EU, and as a result the Euro skyrocketed against the British pound. This led to more and more Brits (and those with another currency the Euro was soaring against) looking outside the eurozone for cheaper and/or better value for money holidays, with more spending liras for their pounds.

This caused what would have been a big fall in tourism and British visitor numbers to be a slight, tiny drop in British visitors, and in overall visitor numbers as well. In Turkey it is a common saying that the tourists of today are the holiday home buyers of tomorrow, and the benefits of this are being felt this year -- especially because those forced to look outside the eurozone were mostly discovering Turkey for the first time.

We can see the benefits of this in the May report from overseas mortgage provider Conti, which said it gave twice the quotes for Turkish mortgages this May as it did last year.

Since then we have heard reports of similar increases in demand from other sources, most of which state that it is more investors that are pushing up the overall numbers, when combined with the core holiday home buyers.

"The reasons for this [increase in the number of investors] are the fact that the Turkish economy is growing much faster than that of the EU, which is also embroiled in a sovereign debt crisis; a sovereign debt crisis that has eradicated much of the competition to Turkish property, including Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal. On top of that Turkey has emerged from the recession as one of the fastest growing, most fiscally stable countries in the world," said Aydin Cakir, director of New Home in Turkey.