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New, affordable, earthquake-resistant luxury near Istanbul for Turkish Citizenship by Investment

Mar 27, 2025 | Residency & Citizenship by Investment

I keep repeating that the Turkish citizenship by investment program is one of the most interesting out there. Why?

– It is an actual investment as opposed to a donation. $400,000 in any real estate in Turkey gets you citizenship
– Your spouse and underage children qualify
– The citizenship goes down the generations as long as the newborns get registered at a Turkish consulate or in Turkey
– It’s possible to do it in crypto (the team on the ground has helped many clients this way)
– You can change your name to a Turkish name (fun, but creates potential banking issues down the line). Most don’t.
– The Turkish passport is a good travel document outside of the Western world
– Turkey offers great consular services and has the third largest number of diplomatic missions in the world after China and the US. It might even soon surpass the US with all the Trump cuts.
– A real economy
– Current geopolitical play between East and West. For example some Westerners with frozen Russian assets were able to unfreeze their Russian assets thanks to the Turkish CBI.

People are quick to say that war is nearby, and that Turkey has historically been involved in conflicts. Is this true? Absolutely. If you’re worried about this make sure to not be there if a conflict starts and don’t overexpose yourself to Turkey, just as you shouldn’t overexpose yourself to any single jurisdiction.

What real estate to buy for the Turkish citizenship by investment?

The biggest mistake to avoid making is buying in developments that specifically target foreigners. I’d say about 75% of Turkish CBI applicants make this mistake. They go online, find some agency and get sold some apartment in a random far-flung Istanbul neighbourhood that is way overpriced but that gives massive commissions to agents. Overpaying by 30%-50% is common.

If you play it right, you can actually make money applying for your CBI. There are three viable routes:

  1. Buy a number of normal apartments on the secondary market, in Istanbul or elsewhere such as in Izmir. This is the best yield play.
  2. Buy one, large, nice property on the secondary market in a prime area. Keith likes to call it “one-shot CBI”. This is typically a lifestyle and wealth preservation play. Don’t expect great yields.
  3. If you are worried about earthquakes or hate older properties, buy in a new building in a very Turkish area but pay local prices.

In this video with Keith we explored option #3. We went to check out a new development in Kocaeli, a booming industrial region close to Istanbul.

https://youtu.be/eJCxPBbXgFI?si=wwaE_k2FpJrxo-yK

Such apartments, because they were built before the Dollar inflation took hold in Turkey, are sold for less than they would cost to build now.

It’s not an investment with exciting yields, but the downside is limited. It just takes longer to find tenants than in central Istanbul, but ultimately you are not overpaying for real estate, which is your biggest risk as a foreigner going into the Istanbul real estate market.

It’s a drama-free way of getting your Turkish citizenship by investment.

To a World of Opportunities,

The Wandering Investor.

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Transcript of “New, affordable, earthquake-resistant luxury near Istanbul for Turkish Citizenship by Investment”

LADISLAS MAURICE: Hello, everyone. Ladislas Maurice from thewanderinginvestor.com. Today, I’m in Istanbul with Keith from Nova Scotia, my real estate buyer’s agent here, and we’re going to go on a little road trip, right, Keith?

KEITH: Yeah, that’s right. We’re going to go to Kocaeli today. That’s an industrial hub about 75 minutes outside of Istanbul. We’re going to look at some affordable luxury today.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Affordable luxury real estate that you sold to some of your clients?

KEITH: Correct, yeah. Very popular, good yields, brand new, and very lovely facilities.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Cool. We’ll do all the numbers as well.

KEITH: Yeah.

Why invest in Kocaeli, Turkey real estate

LADISLAS MAURICE: Keith, why did you feel the need to take your clients to Kocaeli, an hour and a half away from Istanbul, a city of 15 million people? Weren’t there enough opportunities here?

KEITH: Yeah, of course. I mean, there’s always going to be properties available in Istanbul, but we have a high demand for new build properties as well due to the earthquake regulations and safety issues. Kocaeli is one of the fastest growing areas in all of Turkey, and also the prices are really affordable, good yields. And yeah, you can buy new build properties for between, say, $1,250 to $1,750 per square meter, which is significantly lower price point than you’ll find in Istanbul.

If you want to pick up a couple of units and do your CBI and get a decent yield between 5% and 6%, sometimes, it’s actually better than that, but that’s very much hard to get in Istanbul, that kind of yield on a new build property.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Why are people moving to Kocaeli? Because I was looking at some statistics, in the past 15 years, Kocaeli has grown almost 50% in population, which is significant.

KEITH: Yeah. I mean, Kocaeli is actually a huge industrial hub. That’s the number one reason, there are a lot of factories there, and it’s just a fast-growing area, of course. And also, it’s much more affordable for people than Istanbul is. Those are some of the reasons.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay, so it’s essentially a play on Turkish industrialization and on the Turkish manufacturing sector.

KEITH: Yeah, for sure.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay.

KEITH: Yeah, absolutely.

Tour of new development in Kocaeli, Turkey for Turkish CBI

LADISLAS MAURICE: This is nice. A bit loud.

KEITH: Yeah, they’re mowing the grass up there. It’s actually like a little holiday village almost. You have so many really lovely facilities here, hammam, indoor, outdoor pool, very nice gym, ample grounds, very well-landscaped little children’s area there as well. We’re going to go inside and have a look at some of the facilities. We’ve been marketing this project to our clients for the last couple of months, and we’re really happy with the results. And we’re going to go look at one of the units as well, the rooftop duplex apartment, very lovely. Here, you have the indoor pool, of course. I think it’s about 20 meters.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Nice.

KEITH: Good for swimming.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Really warm.

KEITH: Yeah, very nice, yeah.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Gosh.

KEITH: Lovely. In the summer, or even now it’s still very warm, you can just walk from the pool here and go to the outdoor pool.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, this water is like 30 Celsius.

KEITH: First, we’ll go have a look at the sauna, steam room, hammam. This is very newly opened. People just started living here, like, in the last one or two months. It’s about, I would say, 50% occupied at present, but filling up every day.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Cool. And saunas, hammams are a big deal in Turkey. This is a huge plus.

KEITH: Yeah. We’re going to check out the hammam, steam room, sauna. In Turkey, of course, in a sort of luxury project you would expect a hammam. And indeed, you have a very lovely one here as well. First, let’s have a quick look at the, I think this is a salt room. I don’t know much about these things. I don’t know, you sit in there and something happens. [laughs]

LADISLAS MAURICE: [laughs]

KEITH: Here’s your steam room, showers, sauna, changing room. And this is what we call, actually, in Arabic, it’s called the diwaniya. In Turkish, you might say divan. It’s just kind of a sitting area. No smoking shisha in here in this one. [laughs]

LADISLAS MAURICE: [laughs] We had to redo this take because I almost hit my head here. [laughs]

KEITH: Right, disadvantage of being tall in Turkey.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah.

KEITH: All right, here’s the hammam. I’ll just walk through here. You have a kind of separate area as well in the back.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Nice.

KEITH: You have two rooms like this. You lie down there. Somebody scrubs, or you scrub yourself, and you come out of here all happy after you have done your workout. Finally, we’ll go see the gym. We’ll show you where they’re going to put a Zumba or Pilates place as well.

LADISLAS MAURICE: What are the price ranges, roughly, for apartments?

KEITH: I’ll go over that, yeah. Here, they’re actually going to redesign this and make this into the Pilates area. Let’s go see the gym. On the way, I’ll give you the numbers. As I was saying, one of the things I really like about this project is the facilities are not just an afterthought. Some of the projects you see, they put in facilities just to kind of tick the box, to say, “Oh, it has a tennis court, it has this or that.” But everything here is, like, really usable and well done. The hammam, the gym, the pool, they’re all really quite usable and nice condition.

Prices of apartments and villas in Kocaeli development

LADISLAS MAURICE: Cool. And the numbers?

KEITH: Yeah, I’ll get into the numbers in a second. Basically, there’s about five or six–

LADISLAS MAURICE: Keith has been pushing back the numbers. [laughs]

KEITH: [laughs] Yeah, because I have to get them right in my head. There’s, like, five different kinds of units here, as well as villas across there. The villas are more like $800k higher ticket item. But primarily, what we’re looking at here are two and three-bedroom duplex apartments, rooftop duplexes, a couple of garden duplexes. The rooftop duplexes range from, like, $160k to $180k, they’re about 100 square meters. Then we have the garden duplexes. Those would be about $150k, $160k, it depends on the view, the quality of the view, etc., which block it’s in, but those would be your averages. Then you also have, like, a one-bedroom apartment. I think there’s a few of those left. I don’t want to quote the prices on that, but they’re something like $130k, $140k.

LADISLAS MAURICE: All right, fantastic. Let’s go check out one of the units.

KEITH: Sure.

Duplex apartment tour in Kocaeli for Turkish CBI

LADISLAS MAURICE: Cool. You sold a few such apartments, right? How many bedrooms?

KEITH: This one is a three-bedroom, and it’s a duplex, over two floors. Here, you have the living area and the kitchen, open kitchen.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Beautiful views.

KEITH: Yeah, great, amazing views of the Gulf there. And you have these long balconies, which run across both upstairs and downstairs.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Cool, all right. Look, the way I’m looking at this is, if I’m investing here in Turkey and I want the citizenship by investment, I can go for brand new apartments like this, or I do secondary market Istanbul, or I get a new apartment, but much more expensive and without much facilities far away somewhere in Istanbul.

KEITH: Yeah. One of the things that we really liked about this, in our view, it’s kind of a lock on value, because it would be almost impossible to come from scratch, like a hole in the ground, and reproduce this and deliver it in under $1,700 per square meter. With the land costs, the construction, the labor, and materials, everything, you cannot replicate that price, so that’s why we like this kind of project.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Good store of value. It’s hard to see a world where this would be sold cheaper later on in a few years’ time, for sure.

KEITH: Yeah, and they’re yielding between 5% and 6%. Some might be a little bit better, but let’s just say between 5% and 6%, which, for a new build, honestly, you just can’t do that in Istanbul. Not possible.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah. Because, typically, 5%, 6% gross is secondary market in Istanbul.

KEITH: Yeah, maybe you do some renovations and tweak it a little bit, then you’re going to get this kind of higher yield, but there’s no guarantee of that these days as well.

LADISLAS MAURICE: But if you do a new build in Istanbul, typically, 3%.

KEITH: New build, 3% max right now.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Three percent. Okay, cool. All right, let’s go to the second floor.

KEITH: Here, you have the full washroom and your two bedrooms, again, both with access to the terrace/balcony. It’s pretty big up here. I call this a terrace. Again, these amazing Gulf views.

Earthquake risk for real estate in Turkey

LADISLAS MAURICE: This is really nice. Cool. Keith, we need to address something, which is earthquakes. Because I mean this area is–

KEITH: Yeah, we’re right on the fault line.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, right on the fault line.

KEITH: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. There was a big earthquake back here in ’99. And this is a very high-quality construction. We’ve looked at the technical specifications, this is extremely well built. Knock on wood, we always fear big earthquakes, but in this case–

LADISLAS MAURICE: I mean, they know it’s on a fault line. It’s very near, yeah.

KEITH: Yeah, there’s very tight regulations here, we can say.

Tenant profile in Kocaeli, Turkey

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah. Okay, cool. Who’s the tenant?

KEITH: Tenant profile is mostly Turkish, white collar, for sure. Families, but not exclusively families. Of course, you have one-bedroom, and the two-bedroom duplexes might also appeal to single person.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay, cool. Because yeah, on the drive here, there were just so many factories.

KEITH: Yes, lots of factories.

LADISLAS MAURICE: It’s a lot of factories, a lot of economic activity.

KEITH: You have, I believe, Togg, the Turkish electric car company.

LADISLAS MAURICE: I mean, just you can see there’s a sea port down there, there’s another one there. There’s probably some refineries, I guess, around here, or something. Cool.

KEITH: Yeah, lots of economic activity.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Any beaches? [laughs]

KEITH: No beaches that I’ve been to. This is not my beach ground here. [laughs]

LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, no beaches around here.

KEITH: But you have Sapanca Lake, which is one of the most popular lake resorts in all of Turkey. And that’s about 20, 25 minutes from here.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Really?

KEITH: We’re in Akpınar right now, which is in the Kocaeli Province, actually, and the town of Izmit is just down here.

LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay.

KEITH: Yeah, you just jump in the car. I think it’s about 20, maybe 30 minutes to get to Lake Sapanca, and that’s a pretty, beautiful nature/lake area.

Liquidity of Kocaeli real estate

LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay. What about the liquidity upon exit?

KEITH: Yeah, I think as long as you’re not looking to overprice or anything like that, there’d be no issue with that. As always, in Turkey, I think you need to leave three to six months to exit because it’s not quite as liquid due to the mortgage scenario. Just leave yourself a little bit more time than you might, say, in New York, in the glory days when things were moving.

Get in touch with Keith

LADISLAS MAURICE: Fantastic. Keith occasionally organizes such bulk purchases, where he goes and negotiates directly with the developer for a whole bunch of apartments to get better pricing for his clients, so feel free to get in touch with him. There’s a link below. And also, I wrote a whole article on the real estate market in Istanbul, the neighborhoods that are interesting, the neighborhoods to avoid, mistakes to avoid etc., macro picture as well. There’s a link below. Keith, thank you very much.

KEITH: Great.

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