Property sales increase slightly in Turkey, mortgage sales decline

ANKARA

Nearly 120,000 homes were sold in Turkey in May, marking a 2.7 percent increase over the same period last year, the country’s statistics agency has announced.

This was the first yearly increase in sales in the last four months.

However, mortgaged home sales continued to decline and 36,865 mortgaged units were sold in May by an 11.7 percent year-on-year decrease, data from the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK) showed on June 20.

Mortgaged home sales had a 30.8 percent share of all home sales in Turkey.

A total of 119,655 units were sold across Turkey in May with Istanbul again taking the largest share in sales with 20,061 units. Turkey’s largest city was followed by the capital Ankara and the Aegean province of İzmir with 11,919 units (10 percent of all sales) and 7,028 units (5.9 percent of all sales), respectively.

The government and the housing sector have recently boosted their efforts to give a boost to home sales.

Three umbrella organizations of 41 Turkish housing and construction companies have recently announced homebuyers will be given a 20 percent discount on housing prices in the upcoming month, ahead of snap elections on June 24.

Last month, banks also slashed their interest rates for home loans one by one.

Sales to foreigners on rise

Official data on June 20 also showed property sales to foreigners in May rose by 36.1 percent year-on-year, reaching 2,415 units.

Istanbul led with 854 sales, followed by Antalya, Bursa, Yalova, and Ankara.

Among foreigners, most sales were made to Iraqi nationals with 407 houses, TÜİK said.

The followers of Iraq were Iran with 217 home sales, Saudi Arabia with 206 home sales, Russia with 165 home sales and Afghanistan with 131 home sales.