Summer house prices upside down

Real estate prices in Turkey's major tourist areas have dropped by 15 percent to 40 percent, an industry executive said Saturday.

Spurred on by a 1-point reduction in mortgage rates, Antalya's real estate sector experienced a boom toward the end of 2004 and at the beginning of 2005, Sağlam said. The effect was strongly felt in such cameo tourist communities as Antalya, Alanya, Mersin, Muğla, Bodrum, Fethiye and Marmaris.

Many civil servants were able to buy houses at that time, Sağlam added, noting that a subsequent 1.9-point jump in interest rates put a damper on the buying spree, causing the construction and real estate sectors to grind to a halt.

“This increase gave rise to stagnation in the Antalyan real estate sector,” he said. “Sales suddenly stopped and began to decline, leading to a 35 to 40 percent drop in prices today. This is advantageous for buyers.”

“Home sales to foreigners have come to a halt,” Sağlam said. ”Antalya is city with a lot of immigrants, both domestic and foreign. However, state and local governments failed to take advantage of this phase, and, now, home sales to foreigners have dropped by 80 percent. A house bought for YTL 170,000 ($141,000) at a 1-percent interest in 2005 can be bought for YTL 110-120,000 ($91,000-100,000) today.”


http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=97213




Gobble....gobble..............!

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!