Holiday letting stopped being informal

For a long time, the economics of a Turkish coastal apartment were simple enough to describe in a sentence: buy something near the sea, furnish it, and let it by the week through an online platform for the months you are not using it yourself. Nobody asked to see a licence, because there was no licence to see. That era is over. Turkey now regulates short-stay residential letting as a form of tourism accommodation, with a permit, a public register, an entrance plaque and a penalty regime attached to it.

The instrument is Law No. 7464, on the leasing of residential properties for tourism purposes, published in the Official Gazette on 2 November 2023. It created a national permit — the Turizm Amaçlı Kiralama İzin Belgesi, usually translated as the Tourism Purpose Rental Permit — issued under the authority of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism through its provincial directorates, with applications routed through the e-Devlet portal. Since it took effect, letting a residence to guests for short stays without that permit has been an unlicensed activity rather than a grey area.

The trigger is contract length, not intention. The regime captures lettings of 100 days or fewer under a single agreement. It does not matter whether you describe the arrangement as a holiday let, a corporate stay or a favour to a friend of a friend; if the contract runs for 100 days or less and the property is a residence, the permit requirement is engaged. Nor can the rule be sidestepped by writing longer contracts as a matter of routine — repeatedly re-letting the same residence within a year has been treated as falling inside the regime too.

The part that catches foreign owners off guard is not the paperwork. It is the consent requirement. In a building held under Turkish condominium ownership, an application for a tourism rental permit must be supported by the agreement of all the other flat owners, not a majority of them. One neighbour who would rather not share the lift with weekend visitors is enough to stop the application, and there is no appeal against a neighbour simply saying no.

This reframes what due diligence means for anyone buying with letting income in mind. The question is no longer whether the apartment is well located and well finished. It is whether the building is one in which a permit is realistically obtainable: whether the management plan already contemplates tourism letting, whether other units in the block are already licensed, and whether the ownership is concentrated in a few hands or spread across dozens of individual owners who would all have to be found and asked.

Turkish law also limits how much of a single building one person can license. Where a building contains more than three independent units, permits issued for units belonging to the same owner are capped at twenty-five per cent of the total. Buying four apartments in one block and licensing all of them is not a strategy the regime allows. Purpose-built complexes whose management plans expressly provide for tourism use, and buildings operated as serviced residences, sit in a different and considerably easier position — which is exactly why they trade at a premium.