UPDATE - Turkey sees 1.35M house sales in 2019: TurkStat

UPDATES WITH MORE DETAILS

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.

In December 2019, house sales rose by 47.7% to reach some 202,000 units -- 75,480 new and almost 126,600 second-hand -- on a yearly basis.

- House sales to foreigners

Last year, some 45,500 houses were bought by foreigners, up 14.7% compared to 2018.

Istanbul was the top city for foreigners with 20,857 property sales in 2019, while Mediterranean resort city Antalya (8,951 sales), the capital Ankara (2,539 sales) and a northwestern province Bursa (2,213 sales) followed it.

Iraqi citizens were top buyers of Turkish properties with 7,596 house sales. Iranians, Russians, Saudi Arabians and Afghans were among top five.

In December 2019, foreigners bought some 5,300 houses, up 16.2% on a yearly basis. Nearly 900 houses were bought by Iraqis, some 76 by Iranians and 362 by Russians.