Turkey sees 1.35M house sales in 2019: TurkStat

By Gokhan Ergocun

ISTANBUL (AA) - Nearly 1.35 million houses were sold in Turkey last year, the country’s statistical authority announced on Wednesday.

House sales dropped by 1.9% or 26,669 units in 2019, compared to the previous year, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) data.

Nearly 511,700 houses were sold for the first time while the remaining were second-hand sales from January to December.

Istanbul -- Turkey's largest city by population and one of its top tourist centers -- took the largest share of house sales with 17.6% or 237,675 houses in the year.

Official data showed that the capital Ankara and the Aegean province of Izmir racked up 132,486 (9.8%) and 79,221 (5.9%) of total housing sales, respectively.

Mortgaged house sales were recorded at 332,508 -- a 24.7% share of all house sales over the same period.