babylonian

Very sensible posts here - renting somewhere to stay on holiday, whether villa, apartment or hotel, has to be the only sensible way of enjoying your holiday without all the worry associated with property ownership. I've always found it difficult to understand why anybody would want all the hassle of buying a holiday home in a foreign country where they don't understand the language or the law. Or why anybody would want to come on holiday, only to find that the place needs cleaned, a long list of repairs need carried out, it's very hard to find an electrician, a plumber, a glazier, when you don't speak the local language, the local authority taxes need paid, and the garden is a wilderness because the chap you've been paying hasn't been coming. Add to this that you HAVE to come to the same place every year, and the total is more worry than fun! Dogbox, I was in Kalkan just over a year ago, and there are literally hundreds of villas for rent (and of course hundreds of owners who're desperate to find renters - most are lucky to get takers six weeks a year), so either your search terms are wildly off, or you're awfully fussy! And going by the numbers of attempts at hard sell on property by practically everybody we came across, most of them seem to have realised that there just aren't enough renters around, and are trying to sell - there are about 800 (yes really!) houses for sale in Kalkan, out of a total of fewer than 2,000. Soldintime's spot on, now's the time to rent!

There have been several times Catara - up till a very few years ago, non-Turks could only own title to property with the area controlled by a local council or municipality (belediye), which you'd think would be enough for people, but some thought they could buy more cheaply outwith these areas (they were right, you could, because foreign speculators hadn't pushed up the prices). Presumably they also thought they could buy cheap then, and sell dear later on, believing that Turkey's laws would change, and the prospect of a quick buck blinded them to the risks. So lots got caught over the years, till the current government lifted this restriction, but that lifting only lasted a very short time, after which the first "temporary ban" came in, which got removed around, if my memory serves me well, Sept 2005, but then the law changed again in 2006. This time a ban was imposed on sales of property or land in rural areas to foreigners, unless they formed a Turkish company. This latest "temporary ban" has stopped all sales to foreigners, whether rural or within council-controlled areas, and whether to companies or individuals. And like you, yes, maybe if I had a Turkish sibling or perhaps a spouse, maybe, maybe then....

Oh yes Esmerelda, that worked really well, not just the last time, but the other times too that Turkey didn't allow foreigners to own title to land. Lots of people did rather well from it - Catara, what happened was that as a foreigner not allowed to hold title, in order to get round the law you just got a Turk to put the title in his name (Esmeralda's "intermediary") The obvious flaw in this (which didn't seem to occur to lots of foreigners who went with it, and doesn't seem to have occurred to Esmerelda now) is that whoever has his name on the title of a property legally owns the property. And of course after a few months or so, that person can turn round and say to the foreigner (or sucker, as they are often known) "sorry, I no longer can allow you to stay in my house, please leave". And if the said foreigner goes to court, the chap in whose name the title is simply shows the Deed to the judge, who has no choice but to rule that the person whose name is on the Title Deed is the owner of the property. (which is after all the purpose of a Title Deed, if you think about it). There are many, many who are sadder, poorer and wiser after being caught in that one! However, no doubt Esmeralda is correct, and yet another raft of punters will think they are so terribly clever and street-wise that can get round the laws of a foreign country which they don't understand, and they too will stand witness to "caveat emptor"!

A little out of hand??? Turkish government paranoid about letting happen in Turkey what happened in Spain??? Property cheap, running costs low??? Hang about mate, I don't think you've EVER been to Turkey! There has been HUGE amounts of overdevelopment on the south coast of Turkey this past five years - it's not a little out of hand, it's hopelessly out of control. They have exactly duplicated all of Spain's mistakes, resulting in dreary mile after ugly mile of hideous jerry-built concrete monstrosities flung up for the British market, the majority of which as I have previously commented, are now up for sale and not selling. But because most of the purchasers bought during the great but short-lived "Turkey boom", and paid way way over the odds, prices are very high. It's only now dawning on people that an asking price is just that - doesn't mean you'll get it! Running costs are anything but low - it has the most expensive petrol in Europe, by quite a way, electricity is on a par with the UK, food costs for most staples are higher than the UK, luxury foods are well above the prices of the UK, alcohol is more expensive than the UK, medical treatment is expensive, (unless you go to one of the government hospitals, which is not to be recommended) - in fact, I can't think of anything that's cheaper than the UK (except possibly cigarettes) And now, because the true upside of living in Turkey is that there's always something new on the horizon, this week's novelty is that foreigners can't get title to property any more - so any foreigner who has bought can only sell to a Turk! Never gets boring, does it?

"Temporary" in Turkey could mean anything, especially with the country currently in such a state of crisis. The sheer scale of recent (last 5 years) land sales to foreigners has caused something of a scandal, since the extent of it was revealed recently by one of the opposition parties. And since the last thing the AKP, (currently the governing party) needs is yet another scandal just when it is trying to quash the current attempt by the courts to outlaw its very existence, then this measure will quite probably continue at least until the court case is finished, which could take 6 months or more. It will not stop foreigners who currently own property from continuing to do so, nor will it stop them selling their property. But it does mean they will not be able to sell to other foreigners, only to Turks. Who will not, of course, be daft enough to pay the grotesquely inflated prices which many people have paid on the coast. But then again, most sellers have been finding for the past year or two that even the most unaware of foreigners has woken up to the ludicrous and unsustainable level of prices being asked in many areas, with the result that sales of housing have dropped some 40% over the last year, and people trying to sell property just can't get it away.

Upward, NOBODY with any sense listens to programmes like "A place in the sun" - these programme makers only want to make programmes to fill TV space and make money. The vogue for "Place in the Sun/Must have that house" type house-selling programmes has moved over to "Holiday Home from Hell" types, made with utter cynicism by the same people. Turkey is in deep trouble - see my other post above on "Turkey Boom Time". The days of "fabulous profitable finds" is long gone. Those who made such finds sold fast and got out. Those who are left are stuck with them. Lots of foreigners have moved to Turkey (particularly from Britain) and have found that they didn't do their homework, and now don't like it and can't get out, because they can't get anything like what they paid for their properties. The Turkish property market has dropped between 15% and 40% depending on area in the last 6 months. The country is unstable, the economy is in serious difficulty, and the coast is overdeveloped with mile after mile of villas for sale, none of which is cheap (sellers still haven't faced reality, a lot of these houses have been on the market for two or three years), but many of which are tacky. Yet new build goes relentlessly on, olive grove after olive grove ploughed up and covered in grotty concrete horrors aimed at the British market. Add to that the recent announcement from one of the country's most learned earthquake experts that a major quake can be expected by 2010, and go and put your money somewhere else.

Ho ho ho ho - spot the date on Happy's post! Property in Turkey was in trouble already, with off-plan sales dropping and far more villas and apartments being built than there are buyers for. The coast has mile after depressing mile of badly built concrete horrors unsold and unsaleable (some have been on the market now for three years and more) Anybody trying to sell a second-hand home has no chance! And now, just to add to the gloom, the economy has hit the skids, the ruling party looks like being outlawed, there has just been a one-day general strike because of proposals to slash pensions, the country is teetering on the edge of civil unrest (some newspapers are even talking of "civil war"), and Turkey's credit rating by S&P has just been revised downwards from "stable" to "negative". Which "Place in the Sun" type magazine or programme will be first to gush about "opportunities for property purchasers in Turkey", I wonder...?

Amazingly, this is the first instance of a Turkish newspaper acknowledging the crash which has come in the sales of property on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, even though it has been obvious for the past couple of years that things were bad and getting worse. There are literally thousands of unsold properties in all the former holiday resorts and along the coast - Fethiye, Marmaris, Kaş, Kalkan, Kemer, Alanya are all full of villas and apartments for sale. Many have been up for sale now for two or three years, with no movement at all. All of these towns are now full of extremely disgruntled Brits who bought in the hope of high profits renting out their holiday homes, and even higher profits a few years later when they resold. Of course now, with so many places up for rent, they are lucky to get takers for more than six or seven weeks in the year, and their hopes of resale at all, far less at vast profit, have dwindled to practically zero. And yet, there is still an awful lot of building going on. It seems the only property sales are off-plan and new build properties, mainly to Brits who obviously don't read the papers. It's a dire situation, which is only going to get worse; definitely NOT somewhere to invest your pennies!