A key element of the foreign buying process in Turkey has been removed in several provinces allowing investors to complete the purchase within a day. Foreign investors will no longer be subject to a military search - a bureaucratic exercise, costing about £300, to ensure they are not a threat to national security - before the property is bought.
This now enables the property to be purchased and the property deeds (or Tapu in Turkish) to be in the hands of buyers on the same day - the same process for Turks. The military search was lifted after agreements between the General Staff, the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning and the General Directorate of Land Registry Cadastre.
Searches have been lifted in the provinces of Aydın, Aksaray, Adıyaman, Çankırı, Çorum, Isparta, Kahramanmaraş, Karabük, Kastamonu, Kırşehir, Nevşehir, Niğde, Samsun, Sinop, Usak and Yozgat.
However, foreign investors will still not be able to buy real estate on Aydin's Dilek Peninsula, given its location close to the Greek Island of Samos.
There has been no sign when the military search element will be lifted on other areas across Turkey, particularly foreign property hotspots in Istanbul, Antalya and Mugla province, which is the home of Bodrum, Marmaris and Fethiye.
The military search has been in existence since 2004 when Turkey first opened its domestic property market to foreigners.
Then, the search could take up to three months. However, this was a window of opportunity for all manner of frauds and criminals to resell the property several times or by putting the title deed in the name of a friend, while disappearing with the buyer’s investment.
The law was changed in May 2011 when it was declared that a military search was not required on a foreign buyer if the property they were buying in a private complex, for example, had already been subject to a military search in the past.
