Foreign Property Purchases in Turkey Hit a 9-Year Low in 2025: Why That's Not Bad News for Applicants

Official TurkStat data released in January 2026 confirms that 2025 was the weakest year for foreign home purchases in Turkey since 2016: 21,534 homes, down 9.4% from 2024 and a fraction of the 2022 peak of 67,490. Foreign buyers now account for just 1.3% of all housing sales in the country.

The numbers

	2025
Total sales to foreigners	21,534 (−9.4% YoY)
Share of all housing sales	1.3%
Top city	Istanbul, 7,989 (37%)
Second / third	Antalya, 7,118 / Mersin, 1,800
Top buyer nationalities	Russia (3,649), Iran (1,878), Ukraine (1,541)

Why the decline?

Three forces, none of them a program suspension: sharp lira-denominated price growth over recent years, slower residence-permit processing with more neighborhoods closed to new permits, and the post-2022 normalization after the wartime surge of Russian and Ukrainian buyers.

Why this is not bad news if you’re applying

• Less competition for quality stock. The 2021–2022 frenzy produced citizenship-priced inventory of dubious value. A thinner market hands buyers back some negotiating room.
• The citizenship segment behaves differently. The $400,000+ segment is driven by program economics, not by the broader housing cycle, and developers court serious citizenship buyers harder when volume falls.
• Appraisal discipline works in your favor. With mandatory SPK-licensed valuations and a calmer market, the gap between asking prices and appraised values narrows. That appraisal gap is the #1 cause of failed applications.

The full route-by-route rules are in our 2026 program guide. We’ll publish the 2026 half-year TurkStat figures when they land in July.