Case: German-Turkish buyer, Antalya, fund-and-property hybrid, Q1 2025

Profile

A second-generation German-Turkish family, principal applicant a fifty-something engineer at a Stuttgart industrial group. Born in Türkiye, German citizenship by naturalisation in 2003, had renounced Turkish citizenship at that point under the pre-reform rules. Spouse: German-born, no Turkish family ties. Adult son living abroad and not part of the file.

The 2024 Staatsangehörigkeitsmodernisierungsgesetz that came into force on 27 June 2024 was the trigger. The principal had been considering reacquiring Turkish citizenship for a decade, and the reform removed the last German-side blocker. The decision was made the week the law took effect; engagement began in October 2024.

Route and amount

A hybrid of two qualifying paths, total $500,000:

• $250,000 in an SPK-regulated real estate fund managed by a Borsa İstanbul-listed asset manager;
• $250,000 in a Konyaaltı (Antalya) two-bedroom apartment, purchased outright at fair-market valuation.

The hybrid structure isn’t documented in the brochure marketing because the marketing prefers a single-route narrative. The law allows it: the qualifying-investment thresholds can be met by combining qualifying instruments where each portion meets its own route’s documentation requirements and the aggregate clears the minimum that route. We executed each leg as a discrete file linked at the conformity-certificate stage. (Qualifying funds guide.)

Timeline

• October–November 2024. Engagement and document collection. The principal’s reacquisition file (re-establishing the prior Turkish nationality) was opened in parallel; this path was simpler than full new-naturalisation and saved approximately ten weeks at the back end, though it didn’t change the spousal route.
• December 2024. Fund subscription and MKK custody arrangement. Property identified in week three of the search.
• January 2025. Property purchase closed at fair-market value. DAB certificate clean. Spouse’s residence permit filed in parallel, now under the post-2025 rule that requires a separate spousal permit.
• February 2025. Conformity certificates from SPK (fund leg) and Land Registry (property leg) issued within the same fortnight.
• March 2025. Citizenship application filed. The principal’s prior Turkish status came back through reacquisition rather than fresh naturalisation. The spouse’s file ran the standard naturalisation track under Article 12/B of the Citizenship Law.
• April–November 2025. Government processing. Two minor clarification requests on the source-of-funds documentation (a 2019 inheritance was queried; we produced the German Erbschein and the bank’s archived records). One delay around the spouse’s residence-permit renewal that we had pre-empted by filing the renewal six weeks early.
• November 2025. Presidential decision. Both spouses’ files in the same decree.

Total: nine months. A month longer than the median we publish, almost entirely because the inheritance documentation predates the 2019 BDDK record-retention floor and required an archive request that took six weeks.

What the 2024 reform changed for this file

Without the reform, the principal would have lost German citizenship on reacquiring Turkish nationality unless the Beibehaltungsgenehmigung was approved first. The retention application typically ran 18 to 30 months and the approval rate for “no demonstrated retention interest” cases was substantially below half. Under the new law, neither was needed. The German passport remains in force; the Turkish passport was added to it. The Standesamt was not notified because no notification is required.

What worked

• Hybrid structure lowered the property exposure to a $250,000 ticket, which made the Konyaaltı choice (a building intended for the owner-occupier market, not the citizenship segment) viable. The local-buyer pool for the resale in 2028 will be deeper as a result.
• Reacquisition rather than fresh naturalisation for the principal, where the prior Turkish status existed. Faster, simpler, lower friction in the security review.
• Parallel spousal permit under the new 2025 rule, filed at the start, not the end. The post-2025 rule extension to spouses had caught two of our late-2024 files mid-stream; this one was filed under the new rule and ran cleanly.

What was slower

• Inheritance documentation from 2019 required an archive request at the German bank that managed the estate at the time. Six weeks of dead time we couldn’t accelerate. The lesson: if any document predates the BDDK’s 2019 modern record-retention floor, request the archived version at the engagement stage, not at the source-of-funds review.

Where the family is in 2026

The Konyaaltı apartment is the family’s summer base; both spouses spend July and August there. The fund position is held to term — neither liquidity nor return has been a question, and the manager’s quarterly reporting has been consistent. The principal has used the Turkish passport for two business trips to Central Asia that a German passport would have required additional visa work for. The reform-driven motivation (a second nationality without losing the German one) is the part that mattered.

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Diligence access: etc [at] virugroup [dot] company. The fund manager’s name, the reviewing lawyer’s bar credentials and the relevant Resmî Gazete reference for the reacquisition decree are in the unredacted file.