Turkish Property Sales

Archive for March, 2010

Driving through Yenihisar (Didim downtown) I am always mildly surprised how busy and buzzing the place is, even during the out of season months. Sometimes, when you read the forums, negative postings often describe the place as a backwater wilderness littered with half finished unsold apartment blocks.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. The whole town is busy, thriving multicultural, cosmopolitan. The ordinary townsfolk work hard to make a living. In winter it bustles. In summer it heaves.

Living in a holiday resort, you get to learn the ebbs and flows of the area’s life blood. Didim is definitely doing more flowing now than it did 10 years ago.

We bought our first property here about 10 years ago, arriving one cold, wet, miserable April morning. (Where has that time gone?!) We had travelled on the overnight bus from Istanbul so were suffering from that unwashed, slightly crumpled feeling you get the morning after the night before.

The main Ataturk Boulevard was an uninterrupted, unmarked dirt track that I nicknamed the M1. It ran from the Apollo Temple down to the beach with not a roundabout in sight. The attractive, well planted, more safety conscious (debatable but comparatively but true!), two lane thoroughfare of today would have been unrecognisable.

The boulevard connected the Altinkum beach resort at the bottom with Yenihisar at the top. The only stop-off of any consequence inbetween the two was Carrefour (then Gima) and Alo24.

What a difference 10 years makes. 10 years of planning, building, landscaping, surfacing, investing, and promoting.

When we first started selling property, the marina was a fable, a story constructed to help sell the resort – or so many believed. Yet last year the Turkish president no less made a personal trip to the area to attend the opening of the new 70 million dollar D-Didim marina. The much talked oabout Marina Road is close to completion and the whole ‘marina’ area is beginning to take the shape of a future thriving community.

Yildiray and I have, over the years, maintained a strong commitment to and belief in Didim. It still lacks many facilities that we take for granted in our maturer towns – cinema, theatre, a good shopping centre, better municipal sports facilities (eg an indoor pool for winter use).

Yet when you pay just £35 a year in council tax, you cannot expect Didim to be built in a day!

Have just been sat in my car at the traffic lights kicking myself for not having my camera on me as I have just witnessed an excellent example of building site safety (or not) in Turkey.

Imagine the scene, young chap no hard hat. In the summer he’d probably be in flipflops bit as it is still mid winter in Didim (!) he is suitably shod. He is on the fourth floor of a hotel which is obviously undergoing some renovation. It is on the main boulevard where there are always plenty of people walking past.

From four stories up this chap is shovelling debris loose from an uncovered, unsecured balcony directly down into a skip on the ground. There is no chute, no protective screening, no buckets to lower it down gently.  Just shovels full of broken concrete, glass and bricks being gamely chucked over the edge in the hope it would hit the target. If truth be told, he was doing a pretty good job of it as well!

I love the blatant confidence of this country – as long as I am well out of the way!

If there are any mums with young kids out there, this is a great way to spend a Friday morning. There are a few of us that gather at the Belediye tea house every Friday to just catch up on the gossip, complain about our kids and generally have a good laugh while the kids amuse themselves on the playground.

We also try and have the occasional kiddie-free night out as well.

I have just read with incredulity the story about the child who was left stuck up a tree by his teachers because they did not want to distract him and make him fall. Apparently he was up there for some 45 minutes until some passerby took it upon herself to get him down herself. Naturally this lady was herself lambasted by the various authorities.

Why was the school so frightened of touching this boy and getting him down. Is the UK so governed by fear that any incident is met with an immediate withdrawal?

When I took my son into school this morning his teacher greeted him with a smile, a hug and a kiss. It made my heart sing to see that my son was loved and cared for.

Isn’t it strange how the smallest achievements during the course of your day can have the biggest impact on how you are feeling. Today, for me, it was the simple act of finding some green textile paint for my son to take to school as part of a project.

My four year old goes to the Anaokolu here – some may know it more affectionately as the Mushroom school as there is a big mushroom classrom in the grounds. This, for me,  is where the language barrier is at its most painful. Trying to understand your childs scholastic requirements are so important, and I want to be able to do it without my husband’s constant intervention.

My Turkish is not bad, being a linguist by education anyway I have a good grasp of the grammar. It is my lack of vocabulary which lets me down big time. I learn a word, then it is gone. I learn it again. It goes again. I hear a word. I know I should know what it is. Yet my slightly frazzled brain seems incapable of linking things together these days.

Anyway, I am getting there, bit by bit. And this week’s task – buying some green textile paint – has proved particularly stressful. I have to admit to being a supermarket shopper. If it is not in Migros I don’t buy it. I can do a week’s shop in half an hour with a big shopping trolley, and I like to keep it that way! So faced with the prospect of buying something as obscure (for me) as textile paint becomes a major outing.

I am pleased to announce this task has been achieved with flying colours. I managed to pick up my son from school with my head held high, for once.

And you can see from the picture what he did with the paint. Proud? Me?

Now what was that word for textile again…?!

I have cut and paste the excerpt below from Property Investor News, a property website I follow from time to time. Bear in mind that I think it is referring to commercial property rather than residential/overseas property.

Turkish property yields appear to have peaked

Turkish property yields appear to have peaked having stabilised for three consecutive quarters at 9.2%, according to Capital Economics.

Turkish all-property yields are some of the highest in Europe, with only Romania and Russia ahead of them and, according to Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), property owners and developers in Turkey are relatively un-leveraged compared to elsewhere in Europe, which has helped to limit the volume of distressed sales and to prevent capital values from falling as far as elsewhere in the region.

James Purvis, Capital Economics’ property economist, said: ‘As market conditions begin to improve this year and foreign investors regain interest in the country, commercial property investment volumes could recover and we think it is likely that all-property yields could fall by around 20bps during 2010.’

Rental values have started to grow and have increased by +4.5% since their low in Q1 2009.

Gross domestic product (GDP) is predicted to grow by an average of 4%pa between 2010 and 2012 which is above the 1-3% average growth predicted in other Emerging Europe countries.

If anyone can understand what it means do let me know, though from my thin grasp of the context it is more positive and upbeat than doom and gloom!

I was hoping to send out a general invite to readers of this blog to come and meet us at the Place in the Sun Exhibition at Earls Court this coming weekend. Unfortunately the company we were planning on exhibiting with has decided that the money would be better spent on a series of private roadshows across the country. I have to admit that I think they are right. We have done APITS a few times under our own name, and although the show itself has generated interest and plenty of leads, those leads soon frazzle to nothing after a few weeks, no matter how much follow up we do.

If anyone has any comments to make about these shows I woud be really interested to hear them. During the many years we have been in business we have tried every form of advertising there is – and probably wasted a lot of money too.

You would have thought that advertising in something like the Place in the Sun magazine would arouse some kind of interest. We featured in it for three months on the trot recently, at did not have one single response as a result. I think I would rather have spent that money on more pleasureable things – plants for the garden, a holiday for my family, food on the table…!!!

We are actually not doing any advertising at all now. Word of mouth seems to be the only way to go at the moment.

The blossom is appearing on my apricot tree in the garden. It doesn’t last long, but it is beautiful when it first comes out. The apricots aren’t bad either!

There’s a cold wind blowing through Didim at the moment, and I mean that literally not figuratively. We have beautiful blue skies, but there is a bitterly cold wind that cuts to the bone. At least it seems as though the rain has finally come to an end.

All along the front, up the Ataturk Bulvar back down Ege Caddesi, the town is shaking off its winter lethargy to prepare itself for the next summer season. Bars and cafes are sprucing themselves up. Many are undergoing fairly major renovations after the council’s (now halted) clamp down on illegal pergolas.

What people may be surprised about is the amount of new building that is still going on. Despite a worldwide recession, despite a lot of negtive comments about the town, there is still a healthy demand for real estate – both residential and commercial,

Do not despair if you are looking to sell. It may take a while. Sales to foreigners may be down (but definitely not out). The domestic market is ticking over quite nicely, bringing more and more permanent residents to the town.