Case: Saudi family, Istanbul property route, file closed Q4 2024

Profile

A Riyadh-based family of four. Principal applicant: a manufacturing executive in his early forties. Spouse: a pharmacist with her own practising licence. Two children under twelve. Source of funds: a thirteen-year run of documented salary income plus a property sale in Saudi Arabia from 2023.

The family had been considering Turkish property since 2019 as a summer base, with the citizenship attached as a secondary motivation. The decision to formalise both was prompted by the 2024 conversation about a possible threshold increase that, as it turned out, didn’t happen.

Route and amount

Property, $400,000 minimum, executed at $415,000 to give appraisal headroom. A two-bedroom flat in central Şişli, a building from 2017 with iskan in order and a clean seller history.

Timeline, week by week

• Weeks 1–2. Engagement, tax-number issuance for principal and spouse, opening of Turkish lira and FX accounts at a top-three bank with a documented English-language welcome pack for the SAR-USD-TRY trail.
• Weeks 3–4. Property identified after a single trip (three viewings, one offer). Independent appraisal commissioned before contract — important for what came next. Appraisal at $421,000.
• Weeks 5–6. Contract signed at $415,000. Wire from Saudi correspondent bank arrived day two of week five; DAB certificate issued at the originating Turkish bank with the exact transaction reference. Deed transfer at TKGM with the three-year no-sale annotation correctly applied. Total time at the registry: nine working days.
• Weeks 7–9. Conformity certificate (Uygunluk Belgesi) issued from the Land Registry side. No back-and-forth — the documentation was complete on first submission.
• Weeks 10–11. Residence permits for principal and spouse (separately) and children listed on the principal’s file. The 2025 spouse residence-permit rule had not yet come into effect at filing.
• Week 12. Citizenship application filed with the Provincial Directorate of Civil Registration. Family travelled to Istanbul for fingerprinting; a single five-day trip covered biometrics, an in-person bank visit and a building inspection.
• Weeks 13–28. Government processing. Two routine clarification requests, both answered the same week. No defects. Presidential decision in week 28.
• Week 30. Turkish ID cards, passports collected at the consulate.

Total: seven months between contract and passport collection. Six and a half from investment completion. Inside the “good outcome” range we now publish on the process page.

What worked

• Appraisal before contract. Cost $400 to commission; saved the family from making an offer the appraisal couldn’t support, which is the single most common Istanbul mistake.
• One bank account, one wire, one DAB certificate. No corridor bank, no piecemeal funding, no compliance flag at the source-of-funds stage. The thirteen-year salary record speaks for itself.
• Engagement letter with the Turkish counsel on day one. The same lawyer who reviewed the contract handled the citizenship application. No handoffs.
• No “guaranteed yield” attached. The property is the property; the rental arrangement, if any, will be a separate conversation in year two.

What was slower than planned

• Iskan documentation for the building was misfiled at the municipality and took an extra week to retrieve. Not a defect; just the kind of slow paperwork the Turkish system produces. It cost nothing material to the timeline because we were waiting on the conformity certificate anyway.

Where the family is in 2026

The property is rented short-term to corporate visitors through a managed-let arrangement that nets ~5.5% on the dollar basis after fees. Both adults have visited Türkiye twice in the year since citizenship. The current plan is to hold the asset past year three (the sale annotation lifts in late 2027) and reassess on a 2028–29 horizon. The Turkish passport is in active use by the principal applicant for visa-on-arrival travel in two Asia-Pacific destinations a Saudi document would have required pre-clearance for.

What we would do differently

In hindsight, the family could have purchased a $400,000 flat in Kadıköy on the Asian side for slightly better year-three exit math at the same nominal level. The Şişli flat will sell well; the Kadıköy flat would have sold against a deeper local-buyer pool. This is the kind of marginal call that’s only obvious in retrospect. We mention it because saying “everything went perfectly” is the thing we don’t believe and don’t write.

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Counterparties running diligence on this file (the engagement letter, the appraiser’s report, the conformity certificate reference, the bar association registration of the reviewing lawyer) can request the unredacted version via etc [at] virugroup [dot] company.