Rent prices in Antalya skyrocket due to war
ANTALYA
Housing rent prices in the Mediterranean province of Antalya have skyrocketed from 2,500 to around 10,000 Turkish Liras (from $170 to nearly $680) due to high demand from Ukrainians and Russians, Antalya Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ATSO) executive Mustafa Ayanoğlu has said.
“Interest of Russians and Ukrainians, who were seeking a safe place, increased. Thus, [the average] rent price for a house increased from 2,500 or 3,000 liras to around 10,000 liras,” he told Demirören News Agency.
“The major reason behind rising rent prices is the war. Local residents have been affected badly,” he added.
Some furnished houses are being rented to foreigners for exorbitant prices, said Ayanoğlu.
“These houses could even be rented for 40,000 liras a month,” he noted.
Real estate agency representative Ömür Kuşçalar said that demand for houses has doubled in recent weeks, particularly because of the Russian invasion of Ukrainian territories on Feb. 24.
“Rent prices have risen around 300 percent,” he said, adding that around 7 out of every 10 customers seeking a dwelling are either Ukrainian or Russian.
İnna Özderin, a Ukrainian national who has worked as a property market consultant in Antalya for 17 years, said that they are working hard to find homes for families fleeing Ukraine.
“It’s very difficult to survive in Ukraine now. It’s very distressing and hard,” she said.
According to official data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), Russians purchased 1,535 properties in Turkey in the first quarter of this year, up from 938 in the same period in 2021.
In the first three months, Ukrainians bought 381 properties in Turkey, up from 222 in the first quarter of last year.
In March alone, 168 houses were sold to Ukrainians, while only 93 houses were sold to people from Ukraine in March 2021.
Sales to foreigners in the first three months rose 45.1 percent year on year to 14,344 units.
In 2021, home sales to foreign nationals spiked nearly 44 percent from the previous year to an all-time high of 58,576 units, which corresponded to some 4 percent of all house sales in Turkey.
Istanbul was foreign homebuyers’ favorite market. They purchased 26,469 homes in the country’s largest city last year.
Antalya came second with 12,384 units sold to foreign nationals, followed by the capital Ankara
with 3,672.
Iranians bought more than 10,000 properties in Turkey last year, topping the list of foreign buyers, while Iraqis purchased nearly 8,700 homes. Russians claimed the third sport as they bought some 5,379 homes.
Turkey has been generating around $7 billion per year through house sales to foreigners
since 2017.
