Some 234,055 houses were sold in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest and wealthiest city, last year with a total transaction value of 120.6 billion Turkish Liras (around $20.7 billion), a report by the Real Estate Stock Exchange (GABORAS) said.
In 2017, the city saw a total of 238,383 property sales with a total worth of 101.7 billion liras, according to GABORAS’s “2018 Housing Market Transactions” report.
Data show that 122,825 transactions took place for second-hand sales while new homes sales amounted to 111,230 units in 2018. In lira terms, the transaction volume increased by 19 percent from a year earlier, while in the U.S dollar terms it declined by 15 percent.
Istanbul’s Kadıköy district recorded the largest transaction with 10.7 billion liras and 10,729 units, followed by the Esenyurt district with 8.4 billion liras in transactions.
The value of home sales in the Sarıyer, Bakırköy and Beşiktaş districts of the city stood at 8.35 billion, 7.4 billion and 5.7 billion liras, respectively.
In the Esenyurt district, a total of 36,569 homes were sales while the number of property purchases in the Pendik district was 11,818 units. The Sancaktepe district saw 11,122 home sales last year, whereas in the Başakşehir district a little more than 11,000 houses were sold.
The latest data from the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK) showed that home sales across the country soared 15.4 percent on an annual basis to 146,903 units in September that came on top of the 5.1 percent rise in property sales in the previous month.
In September, Istanbul had the highest share of house sales with 15.8 percent and 23,265 units sold, TÜİK said. The capital Ankara and the Aegean province of İzmir followed Istanbul with 14,906 and 8,830 house sales, respectively.
Mortgaged-financed home sales soared more than 410 percent on an annual basis to a total of 57,811 units making up a 39.4 percent share of all house sales in Turkey.
According to recent data from the banking sector regulator BDDK, Turkey’s housing loans extended by local lenders increased from 178.7 billion Turkish Liras at the end of July to 189 billion liras in the second week of October, as banks cut borrowing costs for potential home buyers.
Local lenders slashed their interest rates on housing loans after the country’s Central Bank cut its main policy rate (one-week repo rate) in the months of July and August.
Interest rates on housing, consumers and commercial loans have declined as much as 500 basis points since August, while the decline in those rates amounted to 750 basis points since the start of the year.