Turkey's Home Sales to Foreign Buyers Rise 9.9 Percent in September as the Overall Market Falls 9.3 Percent

Sales of Turkish homes to foreign nationals rose 9.9 percent year on year in September 2026 to 2,167 units, according to house sales statistics released by the Turkish Statistical Institute on 16 October. The increase came in a month when the rest of the market moved the other way: total house sales across Turkey fell 9.3 percent year on year to 142,390 units.

What it means for a foreign buyer

The two numbers point in opposite directions, and that gap is the useful part. Turkish sellers of second-hand stock are facing a market where resale transactions fell 15.3 percent in a single year, to 90,871 units. Foreign demand did not fall with it. If you are negotiating on a resale apartment in a district that trades on domestic demand, you are buying into a thinner buyer pool than the headline national figure suggests, and the asking price has further to travel than it did a year ago. On the coastal and Istanbul stock where foreign buyers actually compete, the pressure is weaker, because that slice of demand grew while the national market contracted. Price your offer by which of those two markets the unit sits in, not by the national decline.

The second usable signal is where new supply is going. First-hand sales, meaning units transferred straight from the developer, rose 3.9 percent to 51,519 and now account for 36.2 percent of all transactions, while mortgaged purchases rose 5.1 percent to 23,397, or 16.4 percent of the total. Developers are still clearing new stock into a falling market, which is where completion incentives and payment-plan flexibility tend to show up first. If you are weighing a developer unit against a resale, the developer side is the one with an active sales desk and a reason to discount this quarter.

Buy the resale discount in a domestic-demand district, or take the incentive on new stock, but do not assume the national 9.3 percent fall applies to the segment you are in.

What changed

Foreign buyers took 2,167 Turkish homes in September, 1.5 percent of all transactions. That is a reversal of direction rather than a surge in volume. In August 2026 foreign buyers took 1,938 homes, a 0.1 percent change on the year, and the January to August run rate was 6.3 percent below the same period of 2025. September is the first month in that sequence to post a clear year-on-year gain.

The composition of that demand also moved. Russian citizens remained the largest single group at 388 units, followed by Iraqi citizens at 166 and German citizens at 162. In August the order behind Russia was Ukraine at 147 and Iran at 140. German buyers appearing in the top three is the notable change, and it points at the euro-denominated buyer rather than the buyer moving capital out of a sanctioned or capital-controlled economy.

The domestic picture is weaker across the board. Second-hand sales fell 15.3 percent to 90,871 units, which is where almost all of the national decline sits. Across the first nine months of 2026, total housing transactions reached 1.09 million, down 7.2 percent year on year, and first-hand sales came to 359,913, down 0.6 percent. The nine-month new-build figure being almost flat while the overall total falls 7.2 percent is the same first-hand versus second-hand split visible in the monthly data, carried across three quarters.

The mechanism

This is a statistical release, not a rule change, and nothing about what a foreigner may buy in Turkey changed in September. The figures come from the Turkish Statistical Institute's monthly house and workplace sales series, which is compiled from title deed transfer records held by the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre. A transaction enters the count at the moment the tapu, the title deed, is transferred at the land registry directorate, which is also the moment ownership legally passes. That makes the series a record of completed transfers rather than of signed contracts or listings, so it lags agreed deals by however long the parties take to reach a registry appointment.

That lag matters for reading the September figure. Transfers completing in September reflect deals agreed in the weeks before, and the Secure Payment System only became mandatory for Turkish property sales on 1 October. Any settlement friction from that change will show up in the October and November releases, not this one.

Context

Foreign buyers have never been a large share of the Turkish market in unit terms, holding at roughly 1.5 percent of monthly transactions through 2026. They matter disproportionately because they concentrate in a small number of provinces and price tiers, and because property purchase is tied to Turkey's residence and citizenship-by-investment routes. The volume decline since 2022 has run alongside a tightening of how those routes are policed, including a move in September 2026 to revoke 1,070 citizenships granted on collusive property sales. September's rise is one month of data against that backdrop, not a trend, and the October release will show whether it holds once the new payment rules are in the numbers.