Christmas Turkey or Wise Turkey Property Investor?

We thought we should drop a few quick lines to try to assist re legal matters and "things" to watch out for when purchasing property in Turkey.

 

 

1.       Find your ideal property

2.       Leave £1,000 to reserve it

3.       Grant power of attorney to a solicitor to follow the process on your behalf and draft your purchase contract (points 1-3 done in Turkey during your viewing trip)

4.       Make payment in line with agreed contract

5.       Apply for military clearance, which takes 3-4 months

6.       After granting of military clearance, convert title to your name

 

Potential Problem?   You will be expected to pay majority of your purchase consideration prior to converting title to your name, at least 50% is usually required in case of resale / completed properties.  Now, one danger, happens very rarely but it does happen, is that the seller accepts a higher offer from someone else and sells the property to a Turkish citizen prior to you obtaining legal title (3-4 months military clearance precedes title).  Turkish citizens do not require military clearance hence title gets converted onto his / her name immediately.  Then you have a case, where you have paid significant sums of money but someone else holds legal title, who has also paid probably the full consideration.  

I must say, in our 400 + sales in the last 5 years, this happened to us only once and it caused no end of grief, although we managed to sue the seller on behalf of the client successfully and obtained a full refund of all sums paid, the whole court case took 3 years to complete.  No one wants this sort of aggravation.    So, what do you do?  Well, you either trust your seller implicitly and do nothing, statistically chances of mishap is extremely low for we would have thoroughly screened your seller prior to introducing you, or take your precautions.  

What you do is place an IPOTEK (charge) on the title deed to the sum of funds you paid over to the seller prior to obtaining your title deed.  This prevents the seller from legally selling the property or altering your rights to the property after contract.  IPOTEK has a cost of nearly 1% of purchase price, however, in our opinion, it is a cost well worth spending.   Your solicitor in Turkey will be more than capable of placing the IPOTEK.

 

 

1.       Clean title check – is it free of any prior charges

2.       Ownership check – does the seller have legal title

3.       Habitation and planning check – does the property comply with local construction laws which ruled at the time of construction.

 

In most cases our property files already include all of the evidence re points 1 to 3 above even before we show you the property.

 

For a more detailed write up on purchasing property in Turkey please refer to http://www.propertyturkeyforsale.com/turkey-property-purchasing-process-c46.html