House sales in Türkiye continue to lose pace as they fell in September to the lowest level in the past three months, official data showed Monday, amid aggressive monetary tightening that has sought to cool spending, the main driver of high inflation.
Some 102,656 residential properties were sold last month, falling some 9.5% year-over-year, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) said. Month-over-month, sales declined 16.4%.
The September figure is down from 122,091 units in August, which marked a slight fall from a year ago despite being the highest level this year.
From January through September, sales dropped nearly 15% compared to a year ago to just over 900,000 houses.
The TurkStat data showed mortgaged sales fell by 50.2% last month from a year earlier to 14,533 units. In the first nine months of the year, they declined nearly 30% to 160,884.
Türkiye's central bank has tightened its benchmark policy rate for four straight months after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reshuffled his Cabinet after the May elections and named a new economic team of technocrats with Wall Street experience and broad support among foreign investors.
The new administration reversed the yearslong easing cycle and embraced more conventional economic policies to rein in stubborn inflation, which rose to more than 61% in September.
The central bank's last rate increase of 500 basis points to 30% in September brought hikes since the June pivot to 2,150 basis points.
Istanbul, Türkiye’s largest city, dominated the housing market in September with 15,247 sales, constituting 14.9% of the overall figure. The capital Ankara and the Aegean province of Izmir followed, with 9,048 (8.8%) and 5,476 (5.3%) housing sales, respectively.
The fall in sales to foreigners also maintained a downward trend, falling 42% year-over-year to 2,930 houses.
Russian citizens still top the list among foreign buyers, having bought 722 houses last month, followed by investors from Iran (327 houses), Iraq (191 houses) and Germany (148 houses).
The figure still reflects Russians’ trend of seeking a financial haven in the wake of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and Western sanctions.
In the January-September period, foreigners bought 28,064 houses, down by 43.5% on an annual basis.
Home sales in 2022 dropped slightly by 0.4% to nearly 1.49 million units. Purchases by foreigners hit a record 67,490 houses, with sales to Russians accounting for almost a quarter of the total figure.
