Lira plunge sees property investors flock to Turkey

London : The plunge in the value of the Turkish lira has fuelled a foreign investor buying spree for Istanbul apartments, with the most interest coming from Gulf countries, according to market observers interviewed by Arab News. Investors from the region are seeking to exploit the near 40 percent depreciation of the local currency against the dollar since January as a political spat with the US and market concern about the fragile Turkish economy has stoked a massive sell-off of the lira.

In an interview with Arab News, Cameron Deggin, founder of PropertyTurkey.com said: “In the last few weeks, unique visitor traffic to our site has more than doubled to over 5,000 a day. We can see from the data that most of the interest is from GCC countries, with Saudi Arabia — as the most populous GCC state — in the lead by a significant margin.”

Some of the Saudi interest, but not all, was from people who originally came from other Middle East states such as Jordan, Iraq and Tunisia, but who have had residency rights in KSA for many years, and in some cases are the children of families who arrived one two generations ago. Over the past five years, Deggin said that Gulf investors had flocked to Istanbul, buying up apartments as second homes. This was more because they felt an affinity with Turkey as a Muslim country with a cultural vibe that they found appealing, rather than because they saw real estate as a canny investment, although the weakening lira has helped. That trend has accelerated this year as the currency crisis has intensified.