Contraction in housing market continues in May, show data

ANKARA

The annual decline in home sales continued for a third month in a row this year in May, data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) have shown.

Home sales fell by 2.4 percent last month from a year ago to 110,588 units, after plunging nearly 12 percent year-on-year in April.

Sales, however, surged 46 percent from April, when around 76,000 units changed hands in the country.

Mortgaged home sales nosedived 64 percent year-on-year to only 9,900 units in May, accounting for 9 percent of all residential property sales.

The cost of housing loans has been on the rise since the Central Bank started to lift its policy rate. The interest rate on housing loans climbed from 19.4 percent at the end of May 2023 to 44.98 percent as of May 31, according to data from the Central Bank.

Mortgage-financed home sales plunged 59 percent year-on-year in the January-May period to 44,602 units.

As was the case in the previous months, Istanbul was the hottest property market. Last month a total of 19,000 homes were sold in the country’s financial and commercial capital.

Ankara came second with 9,861 sales, followed by the southern province of Antalya on the Mediterranean coast with 6,306, TÜİK said on June 13.

In May, foreigners bought a total of 2,064 homes in Türkiye, marking a steep 34.8 percent decline compared with the same month of last year.

Sales to foreign nationals accounted for 1.9 percent of all home sales in the country in May.

Foreigners bought 797 homes in Antalya, down 36 percent from May last year, while residential property sales to foreign nationals in Istanbul declined 28 percent annually to 668 units.

The southern province of Mersin ranked third in home sales to foreigners at 164. Sales in this province also plunged 34 percent year-on-year.

Russians were the top foreign homebuyers. They purchased 437 homes in Türkiye in May, down from 991 in the same month of last year. From January to May, they bought more than 2,000 properties in Türkiye, down 63 percent from the same period of 2023.

Iranians and Ukrainians ranked second and third at 207 and 171, respectively. German nationals also bought 104 homes in Türkiye last month.

In the first five months of 2024, a total of 9,000 homes were sold to foreign nationals, which translated into an annual decline of 45.8 percent.

In the January-May period, Türkiye’s housing market contracted 3.4 percent from the same period of last year. In five months, 465,761 homes changed hands in the country, according to TÜİK data.