Turkey Sells 1,938 Homes to Foreign Buyers in August as Total Sales Fall 14.7 Percent

Foreign buyers took 1,938 Turkish homes in August 2026, up 0.1 percent on August 2025, according to house and workplace sales statistics released by the Turkish Statistical Institute on 17 September. That flat result came in a month when the domestic market contracted sharply: total house sales across Turkey fell 14.7 percent year on year to 127,410 units.

What changed

The headline number is a decline of roughly 22,000 transactions. Turkey registered 149,440 house sales in August 2025 and 127,410 in August 2026. The drop is concentrated almost entirely in the resale market. Second-hand sales fell 19.4 percent to 83,032 units, while first-hand sales, meaning transfers of newly built stock straight from the developer, fell only 4.5 percent to 44,378 units.

Mortgaged sales moved the other way. Turkey recorded 22,131 mortgaged house sales in August, up 7.2 percent year on year, and mortgage-financed purchases accounted for 17.4 percent of all transactions in the month. Roughly four in five Turkish homes still change hands without a mortgage.

Sales to foreign nationals were 1,938 units, 1.5 percent of the national total. Russian citizens remained the largest single group of foreign buyers at 343 units, followed by Ukraine at 147 and Iran at 140. Across the first eight months of 2026, foreign buyers took 13,141 Turkish homes, down 6.3 percent on the same period of 2025. Total house sales for January to August 2026 were 950,529 units, down 6.8 percent from 1,020,207 a year earlier.

The commercial side of the release shows a similar pattern. Sales of business premises totalled 15,937 in August, down 6.4 percent, with 118,198 sold in the first eight months, down 5.3 percent. Mortgaged sales of business premises jumped 67.6 percent to 652 units, off a small base.

The mechanism

These figures are not survey estimates. The Turkish Statistical Institute, TÜİK, compiles the series from title deed transfer records held by the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, the TKGM. A sale enters the count when the tapu, the title deed, is transferred at the land registry directorate, which is the same moment ownership legally passes. Sales to foreigners are classified by the nationality recorded on the buyer side of that transfer.

Two consequences follow for anyone reading the series. First, it is a completions series, not a contracts series: an off-plan unit sold today appears in the data only when the deed is issued, which can be years later. Second, because the classification runs on the nationality of the registered owner, a purchase made through a Turkish company does not show up as a foreign sale. The 1,938 figure is the floor on foreign participation, not the ceiling.

The release covers August, the last month of Turkey's summer buying season, and is published on the seventeenth of the following month under TÜİK's fixed statistical calendar.

What it means for a foreign buyer

The divergence between the domestic and foreign lines is the useful signal. Turkish resale volumes are down almost a fifth while foreign demand is flat, which means a foreign buyer is now competing against a thinner domestic bid than at any point in the past year. That matters most in the resale segment, where sellers are meeting fewer buyers and where negotiating room is widest.

The first-hand market tells a different story. New-build sales held up far better than resale, so developers are not under the same pressure to discount, and a buyer looking at off-plan or recently completed stock should not expect resale-style concessions.

The mortgage line is the caution. Turkish mortgage volumes rising 7.2 percent in a market falling 14.7 percent reflects a credit market that is still very small relative to the whole, and one the central bank has kept on hold at a 37 percent policy rate. Foreign buyers in Turkey overwhelmingly transact in cash. Financing availability is not what is moving this market.

Nationality mix is the other thing to watch. Russian, Ukrainian and Iranian buyers together accounted for 630 of the month's 1,938 foreign purchases, roughly a third. Concentration at that level means the coastal markets where those buyers cluster are exposed to shifts in a small number of source countries rather than to broad international demand.

Context

Foreign nationals can buy residential property in Turkey in their own name in most of the country, subject to military zone clearance on the parcel and to reciprocity and area limits that apply by nationality and by district. Purchases are completed at the land registry directorate with a valuation report, and Turkey also operates an investment route to citizenship based on a qualifying property purchase held for a set period. The monthly TÜİK series is the only official, comprehensive count of how many foreign buyers actually complete, which is why it diverges from developer and agency sales claims.

The September data, covering the end of the season, is due in mid-October.