Whilst Turkey is essentially a beautiful country and you have some money in your pocket you can really live a good life be it for long-term investment or the lifestyle.

Beautiful as it may be the laws keep changing. Currently if you bought a piece of land which was arsa (non-agricultural land with building permissions) sometime last year the laws stated that you could buy it under your own name. By the time the Tapu (title deeds in your name) arrive which could be a few months then you are subject to todays law which states that you have to form a limited company. This can be ridiculously expensive if you have only bought a plot of land for one house!!!!!!!!!!!!! Something like 2-2,500 YTL to set the company up, and then, though the the limited company may lie dormant (not trading) you still have to employ an accountant monthly to do the non-existent books. This can also set you back by 2-250 YTL monthly. Then there is something called the 'stopaj' where you need to pay out further sums (unknown quantity) of money to the government.

The laws were changed only recently to stop large swathes of land being purchased by huge companies. The trouble is the Turkish government has not the commonsense to differentiate between the small private plot-holder and the truly large business land holders.

The laws are a mess!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So reiterating, if you bought last year assuming that you got the Tapu under your own name unfortunately you have to now accept the new law which is totally unfair. No doubt this will really put paid to some people even bothering going there. To top it all you cannot get rid of the limited company that easily (this can take in some cases almost 2 years). Until you have sold you will have to continue paying the exhorbitant fees for what I don't know.

The whole purpose of hiring a lawyer is that they will do their job. However, this is not to be. Solicitors make up excuses of not knowing what is going on and are vague and uncommunicative about the changes going on. I don't know whether in some instances it is because they want to continue lining their own pockets. Since there seems to be no regulated body as such in Turkey you cannot really question their motives and actions and they do tend to get on the defensive about this.

Turkey is a place that once you start paying for property services through a solicitor you keep on paying out more and more with no real breakdown of costs and no proper set prices regarding different priced properties. You can buy a big or small house and you can still pay a set fee. If the property is small the fee appears terribly high if it is large then the fee seems OK. They do not seem to understand that a good pricing strategy and policy would be more efffective, and certainly, more transparent for the customer.

The the laws are under review again. Let's hope that the government will sort these stupid problems out for those who genuinely only want to buy for themselves.