About 15 months ago, we started thinking about moving to another country.
Türkiye was not really in the front of the race, but mainly professional reasons were the deciding factor that we put Portugal or Spain aside.
It was a time full of preparations, tactical considerations, some disappointments and many surprises, but only the time after the move can be described as “complicated”.
No matter how much you had planned through the details, the information you based your plans on often turned out to be insufficient or too theoretical.
In fact, you had to start your research anew by consulting new sources and, above all considering “the human factor”. But somehow it goes ahead, and if you take such a risk, especially professionally oriented, your approach is more systematic, the network grows faster and the tips are more reliable than on many emigration sites, expat forums or from friends. You also profit from this privately.
If you exclude the traffic situation in the large cities, the reasons for the everyday annoyance hardly differ from those, which you had in Germany. Is that a sign that you are gradually shedding your emigrant status?
Well, anyway, the expat forums still serve the daily exchange, you still follow meetings of the Beach Speakers, Conversation Meetings in Dos Bros Antalya, even if you do not always participate, visit flashy Christmas markets on the Roof Top of a shopping mall to meet your peers.
Yes you meet them, and often experience a journey into your recent past: lots of questions in your head and lots of choices for the right answer.
The first major hurdles are finding an apartment or buying real estate, and the formalities involved. No matter if you are a Turkish immigrant with a German background (what an expression), or a biological foreigner (and that also reminds me of old days in the distant homeland).
This is followed by topics such as residence permits, driver’s licenses, school selection for the children, but the topic of real estate always remains in the foreground.
No wonder, Türkiye has been experiencing a real estate boom for years and the construction sector is the driving force behind economic growth. In addition to Germans with a Turkish migration background, there are now also Britons and Eastern Europeans who see profitable investment opportunities here. In addition, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is additionally driving immigration.
You don’t have to be an expert to realize that in cities like Mersin, Muğla or Antalya, real estate prices now hardly reflect the real value of the property but have reached purely speculative sales prices that a local can hardly afford. If a civil servant needed 38 monthly wages in 1982, in order to buy a dwelling, it is today 121 monthly wages for the same object.
The following is an example of this, which is not an isolated case.
In Konyaalti, a currently preferred district of Antalya for real estate investments, I talked to the partner of one of the larger real estate companies. So, a Russian tourist arrives and buys a property for 100.000 Euro through a real estate agent. After 6 months of vacation in Antalya, he now goes to the same real estate agent and wants to sell his property because he wants to move to Alicante with his family. He ads his expenses on it of course. The broker sells the same property for 140,000 euros. The new owner is another foreigner, who just moved to Antalya. Their Turkish neighbors also take notice of this and value their property higher themselves. A madness, one cannot believe.
Another example:
Often developers offer discounts for properties in the project planning phase. Buy now and sell the property for when it is 80% or 90% complete. This is a 50sqm apartment. The family of five investing here will never be able to move into this property. There are high-rise buildings with 1+1 apartments shooting out of the ground, which only serve as speculation objects. If you enter as an emigrant into Turkey, you must deal exactly with these topics. It is a misconception, if you think, you can snatch a real estate during your vacation.
Those times are long gone. And as the above examples underline it, the whole thing has taken on highly speculative features.
There is a lot of personal greed involved. And not just in the real estate sector. In everyday life, you are actually very often confronted with price and quality fluctuations.
For immigrants, it is easier to make many wrong decisions at the beginning than to make the first right one.
I hope that some of our articles will help you to make fewer mistakes, at least when it comes to real estate topics. If there are still questions or subjects that have not been covered here, then we are of course happy about your suggestions, which you can send to red@immo-turkiye.com.
Enjoy sunny Türkiye.
