How to Check a Property Developer in Turkey Before You Buy
Turkey has kept a public register of licensed building contractors for years, and almost no foreign buyer looks at it. It will tell you whether the company selling you an off-plan apartment is authorised to build at all, what size of project it is rated for, and whether its certificate has ever been cancelled. Here is how to read it — and what the 2026 law change added.
The question nobody asks: is this company licensed to build?
A foreign buyer looking at an off-plan development in Turkey will usually ask about the price, the payment schedule, the delivery date and the view. They will look at a brochure, a set of renders and a show apartment. What they very rarely ask is the most basic question available to them: does the company putting this building up hold a valid building contractor authorisation certificate, and what does the State’s own record say about it?
That record exists, it is public, and it is free to search. Turkey requires building contractors to hold an authorisation certificate — a yapı müteahhitliği yetki belgesi — and to use the certificate number on their construction work. A contractor cannot lawfully take part in a construction project without one. The register that holds these certificates is YAMBIS, the Yapı Müteahhitliği Bilişim Sistemi, operated by the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change, and it can be queried by anyone through Turkey’s e-Devlet portal using a contractor’s identity number, tax number or certificate number.
It is not a substitute for legal due diligence and it will not tell you everything you want to know. But it answers, in a few minutes and from your own laptop, a question that no amount of brochure-reading will: whether the counterparty is who they present themselves as being, and whether the State has ever taken their licence away.
This guide sits alongside our walk-through of buying off-plan property in Turkey, which covers contract structure and the protections most buyers never ask about. Read that for the deal; read this for the company.
The Contractor Register — At A Glance
What YAMBIS is and how to reach it
Running the check, in order
Six steps, none of which cost anything, all of which are easier before a deposit than after one.
Get the legal name and the certificate number in writing
Not the marketing name on the hoarding — the registered company name, its tax number, and the building contractor authorisation certificate number. A legitimate contractor uses that number on construction work as a matter of course and will have no difficulty giving it to you. Reluctance at this stage is itself an answer.
Query the register through e-Devlet
YAMBIS is reachable through the e-Devlet portal, and the query accepts an identity number, a tax number or the certificate number itself. Cross-check that the name returned matches the entity named in your draft contract exactly. A near-match is not a match; Turkish corporate groups frequently run several similarly named companies.
Read the status, not just the existence of a record
A record can show a certificate that is valid, suspended or cancelled. The presence of an entry does not mean the contractor is currently authorised. This is the single most important field on the page and the one a buyer skimming a screenshot is most likely to miss.
Check the classification group against the size of the project
Contractors are graded into groups from A through H according to economic, financial, professional and technical capacity, with the later letters corresponding to smaller project capacity. A contractor rated for modest work who is marketing a large multi-block development is a mismatch worth asking about before you accept an explanation.
Watch for a temporary certificate
A temporary authorisation is a narrow instrument. It permits an owner to build on their own account only, within limits of two storeys and 500 square metres, for a single project, and it is valid within a five-year frame. It is not a licence to develop and sell apartments to the public. If a temporary certificate is what underpins a project being marketed to foreign buyers, stop.
Then do the things the register cannot do for you
Visit completed schemes by the same contractor and ask owners how handover went. Have a Turkish lawyer examine the land title, the building permit and the contract. Confirm the payment route. The register clears a threshold question; it does not clear the deal. Our note on using a lawyer to buy property in Turkey sets out the rest.
Six documents and checks that go with it
The contractor certificate is one thread. These are the others, and they are the ones that decide whether a finished building is legally yours to own and occupy.
The building permit
The permission under which the scheme is being built, naming the parcel and the approved project. Marketing material is not a permit, and a scheme sold before permission is a different risk entirely.
The occupancy permit
The iskan certifies that the finished building matches its approved plans and passed final inspection. On an off-plan purchase this is the document that turns a promise into a home.
The payment route
Funds for property purchases now move through Turkey’s mandatory secure payment system rather than passing directly to a seller. Being asked to route around it is a reason to pause.
The title position
Who owns the land the scheme sits on, and what is registered against it. On off-plan schemes the land title and the selling entity are frequently not the same party.
The building’s vintage and code
For anything not newly built, the earthquake code applicable to the build date tells you more about structural risk than the finish quality ever will.
An independent valuation
An appraisal by an SPK-licensed valuer is an independent read on the asset. Our note on valuation reports explains when one is compulsory and when it is simply sensible.
What the register answers — and what it cannot
A public licensing register is a threshold check, not a credit report. Knowing where it stops is what stops it being misused.
| Question | Does YAMBIS answer it? | Where the answer actually comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Does this contractor hold a valid authorisation certificate? | Yes | The register entry itself, and its status field. |
| Has the certificate been suspended or cancelled? | Yes | The status shown against the record. |
| What scale of project is this contractor rated for? | Yes | The classification group, A through H. |
| Is this a temporary certificate rather than a full one? | Yes | The certificate type, together with its statutory limits. |
| Is the company financially sound today? | No | Financial statements, banking references and a Turkish accountant. |
| Are earlier projects late, unfinished or disputed? | No | Site visits, owners at completed schemes, and litigation searches by a lawyer. |
| Was the workmanship on the last scheme any good? | No | Independent survey, and talking to people who live there. |
Law No. 7579 put teeth into the licensing regime
The register has existed for years. What changed in 2026 is the consequence of abusing it. Law No. 7579, published in Official Gazette No. 33261 on 22 May 2026, reached into more than a dozen statutes covering zoning, building inspection, the land registry, the cadastre and condominium ownership. Several of its provisions are aimed squarely at construction accountability.
Building without an authorised contractor, or obtaining a classification certificate on false or fraudulent documents, now carries a sealing order and cancellation of the contractor’s certificate number for five years. That is a serious sanction: five years is long enough to end a mid-sized construction business, and the sealing order stops work on the building itself. For a buyer, the relevant point is that the register entry you are looking at now carries real weight, because the cost of misrepresenting a classification has gone up sharply.
The law also extends responsibility down the supply chain rather than stopping at the main contractor. The building-inspection regime now reaches ready-mixed concrete suppliers and soil-survey firms, with administrative fines attached to supplying concrete to unlicensed or unauthorised construction and to discrepancies in core testing and delivery documentation. Technical personnel at soil and foundation survey organisations who cause a licence cancellation, or who accumulate three administrative fines within the last five calendar years, are barred for three years from working at any soil survey, building inspection or laboratory organisation and from becoming a partner in another one.
Alongside this, a periodic fire-safety inspection regime was introduced, and fire-safety documentation is expected to become a standard part of sales files rather than an afterthought. Most of Law No. 7579 took effect on the day it was published; certain provisions run from 31 December 2026. We set out the wider package in our briefing on Turkey’s 2026 property law changes.
Why counterparty risk is the off-plan risk
Turkey’s purchase process has become steadily more regulated. Ownership is recorded centrally by the Land Registry, purchase funds move through a mandatory secure payment system rather than passing directly to a seller, and compulsory earthquake insurance has to be in place before a transfer can register. Each of those reforms closes a gap that used to hurt foreign buyers.
What no reform can do is make a construction company competent. The residual risk in an off-plan purchase is not that the legal framework will fail you — it is that the counterparty will not deliver what it promised, on time or at all. That risk is not addressed by reading the contract more carefully. It is addressed by choosing a better counterparty, which means doing the work before you sign rather than after.
The licensing register is the cheapest step in that work and the one most consistently skipped. It is public, it is free, it takes minutes, and it occasionally returns something that ends a conversation. A buyer who runs it has not made an off-plan purchase safe; they have removed one specific way of being wrong, which is the only thing due diligence ever really does.
If you would rather not do this alone, that is reasonable — the register is in Turkish, the corporate structures are layered, and reading a classification against a project’s real scale takes some familiarity. Our broader guide on whether it is safe to buy property in Turkey puts the whole risk picture in one place, and the buyer’s guide covers the purchase sequence end to end.
Considering an off-plan scheme in Turkey?
We check the contractor, the permit, the title and the payment route before anything is signed.
Where to go next
The rest of our off-plan and due-diligence library.
- Buying off-plan property in Turkey — contract structure and the protections buyers never ask about.
- The habitation certificate (iskan) — the document that signs off a finished building.
- Building age and earthquake codes — what the build date tells you about structure.
- Escrow and the secure payment system — how purchase funds are protected.
- Property valuation reports — when an SPK appraisal is compulsory.
- Turkey’s 2026 property law changes — the full Law No. 7579 package.
- All Turkey property guides — the full library for international buyers.
- Turkey property buyer’s guide — the complete purchase walk-through.
Checking a Turkish property developer — frequently asked questions
What the contractor register shows, what it does not, and what Law No. 7579 changed.
Have the checks run before you commit
Tell us the development you are considering and we will check the contractor’s authorisation certificate and classification, the building permit, the land title and the payment route before anything is signed. We work with licensed Turkish conveyancers and appraisers, and every transaction settles through the secure payment system.
Join The Discussion