Turkey’s housing sector expects to surpass 1.2 mln units sale target

ISTANBUL - Reuters

Turkey’s housing sector representatives expect to close the year surpassing their year-end target at 1.2 million units due to a sharp rise in property sales after the Nov. 1 elections after seeing a decline in sales in the previous months. 

Housing investors chose to wait ahead of the elections due to dramatic fluctuations in foreign exchange rates and a steep increase in interest rates, but have created a sharp demand for the last two weeks, according to sector representatives. 

According to data from the Turkish Statistics Agency (TÜİK), the number of property sales decreased in September by 20.1 percent compared to the same month of 2014, marking the steepest decline since July 2014. 
 
“We actually took our construction permit one month before the elections, but we preferred to launch the project after the elections as there was strong pessimism among consumers before the polls,” said the head of the EYG Group, Ömer Faruk Çelik. 

“Potential investors got confused about their property investments amid political and economic uncertainties after the June elections. They adopted a wait-and-see tendency about their potential investments amid a rise in interest rates and fluctuations in foreign currencies. We have now seen an obvious revival in the housing sales for the last two weeks after the November elections,” he added. 

There has also been an increase in the launch of new property projects across the country since the Nov. 1 elections, especially in Turkey’s biggest cities. 

For instance, an $800 million project, dubbed Piyalepaşa Istanbul, in the touristic district of Beyoğlu was launched just one week after the elections. 

With the spreading optimism among consumers which has been fueled by political certainty after the elections, the sector will most probably surpass its year-end target of 1.2 million units, said Çelik, who is also the head of the Property Developers and Investors Association (Konutder). 

“Especially the Gulf investors seem to accelerate their property acquisitions in Turkey. We expect to see more foreigners in the market by 2016,” he added. 

According to the TÜİK data, a total of 936,615 properties were sold in Turkey in the first nine months of the year.