Positive Headlines for Turkey as There are Strong Increases Across a Wide Range of Sectors

Right now, Türkiye (Turkey) is experiencing a mini-boom across many of the sectors that were highly affected by the pandemic with positive increases in Property Sales both domestically and from foreign buyers, Travel and Tourism & Turkish Airlines. It’s been an extremely busy year so far and with the School holidays nearly upon us, the predictions & targets for the rest of the season should be easily achieved.

Property Sales in Türkiye actually reached their highest level ever in March with a year on year increase of 20%, and over 134,00 units sold. Mortgage sales also increased 38.8% year on year and according to TurkStat, there was an increase of just over 21% for the period of January to March resulting in around 320,000 units sold in total. Foreign buyers contributed significantly to the overall figures, with a total annual increase by 45% for the period of January to March, completing on just over 14,000 units, the best quarter for international buyers ever. Sales were of course helped by the depreciation of the Lira which made it more attractive to invest, but a new economic policy of low interest rates also proved successful. The 2022 target for foreign buyers – $10bn… it’s been a successful start!

Given that Türkiye is fully expected to be the fourth most popular destination for Tourists this Summer, it will come as no surprise that Travel and Tourist GDP is also expected to grow by 5.5% per year over the next 10 years and it might also reach a point where it’s responsible for around 11% of Türkiye’s total economy. So far this year the Cappadocia Region has already attracted over 1m tourists and Pamukkale, one of Turkey’s oldest attractions welcomed 431,000 tourists. Cappadocia is well known for its fairy chimney’s, underground cities & caves, gorgeous landscape views and balloon rides, whilst Pamukkale is best known for its mineral-rich thermal springs and white terraces.

Turkiye’s National Carrier Turkish Airlines has also reported an extremely fruitful start to the year carrying over 24 million passengers during the period of January to May. This mainly consisted of local routes around Turkiye + International travel, without forgetting of course that its Cargo Arm also transported nearly 673,000 tonnes of goods in the same period. Slowly getting back to pre-pandemic levels there were 6.3m passengers in May 2022 compared to only 5.9m in May 2019.

Reading the above, it will also come as no surprise that International arrivals are also on the up, and according to stats released by the Culture and Tourism Ministry, April of this year increased by 225% when compared to April of 2021. Just to give you an idea of numbers, that’s around 2.57m tourists compared to just 791,000. Istanbul, Antalya & Erdine were all proving to be extremely popular, with Istanbul visited by around one million tourists in April alone. Travellers are from all over the world mainly Germany, Bulgaria, Russia and the UK.

It’s definitely the case that Turkiye is in demand, and Istanbul is seeing a significant increase in people arriving for shopping, health tourism, historical/cultural visits and general vacation purposes. In fact it’s become that popular that visits this April increased by 135% when compared to 2021. Predictions for 2022 could reach 42 million tourists in total, resulting in a revenue of around $35bn USD. Muberra Eresin who is the Chairman of the Turkish Hotelliers Union commented recently that 2022 will be a far better year than 2021, the wounds from the pandemic will have healed, tourism revenues will rocket and Istanbul will once again become one of the World’s top three global destinations.

Our thanks to AIPP member agent, Turkish Connextions for this article.