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Real estate acquisition of foreigners in Turkey until the 2000s was not a very remarkable phenomenon. The Turkish market for international sales was predominantly open to Western countries and the figures for the related indicators such as the number of individual buyers, range of countries, types and size of the properties were incomparably low considering today’s numbers. The legal regulations framing sales to foreigners and country-based restrictions tended to reflect militarist and secular sensitivities. The spatial distribution of property sales to foreigners across Turkey was mainly shaped by the peculiar conditions of the country. In addition to large metropolitan areas such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, as a result of the international tourism development in the 80s and 90s, Western tourists started to purchase second homes for lifestyle-based motivations along the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts of Antalya and Muğla provinces, too. Thus, until the 2000s, this phenomenon did not attract much attention either in the mainstream media or in the academia. During those decades, academic works were mainly limited to law studies, remaining far from seeing the situation as a socio-economic and cultural challenge for the Turkish society. Real estate acquisition by foreigners has become an unignorable phenomenon in Turkey today, which is strongly related to global relations and the neoliberalization of the economy. It causes considerable local socio-cultural impacts in both coastal and inland towns and cities of Turkey. The origins of the buyers are ever diversifying while the size and number of properties are rapidly increasing. The ever growing property sales to foreigners in recent years is actually a reflection of neoliberal economy policies on the property market and there has been a change of state perspective from restriction to encouragement. During the early 2000s the focus of discussions around foreign property sales was on retired Europeans heading for the southern coastal zone of Turkey while today the reactions and discussions focus on the growing interest of the Arab world in the Black Sea and Marmara regions. Especially the year 2012 represents a starting point in the change of leading countries shifting from Europe to the Middle East. This study aims to analyze foreign real estate acquisition in Turkey from a temporal-spatial perspective. We claim that, within the multidimensional neoliberalization process of the post-2000, there is a paradigmatic change in the way that the real estate acquisition of foreigners is viewed and instrumentalized to integrate the country’s economy to the global real estate market. We also suggest that real estate acquisition of foreigners in Turkey cannot be considered only as an economic process. It is known that during the last two decades, Turkey has been undergoing a change within the international migration system and becoming a migrant receiving country. Real estate acquisition of foreigners is a significant aspect of the migration flows which play an initial role in settling in a certain place permanently. Analyzing the shifting boundaries of foreign real estate acquisition in Turkey both at the national (at provincial and district scales) and international levels (origin countries) can provide a wider perspective that will contribute to migration studies literature. There is an ever enlarging geographical expansion of property ownership across Turkey, that is creating diverse regional patterns based on different motivations and the origins of the buyers. The statistical data from 2002 to 2016 that we used in our study was obtained from the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastres. The analyses are based on the countries of origin of the buyers and preferred provinces and districts in Turkey. The geographical distribution of real estate acquisition of the foreigners is presented through thematic maps at different scales. Spatial analysis techniques such as Moran’s I and Local Moran’s have been used to interpret significant concentration spots. © 2020 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. |
