Reidin.com, an online real estate information service, in cooperation with Garanti Mortgage, released its latest house price index for February on Monday, tracking house price movement in seven large cities in Turkey -- Adana, Ankara, Antalya, Bursa, İstanbul, İzmir and Kocaeli. According to the study Kocaeli, with the highest increase in house prices in the country, saw sales prices and rents rise by 0.83 and 1.06 percent from January to February, respectively. Antalya, on the other hand, saw the greatest drop in house prices, with a 0.55 percent decrease in February over the prior month. During the same period house prices in İstanbul, Bursa and Ankara rose by 0.73, 0.55 and 0.48 percent, respectively, while prices in İzmir dropped by 0.41 and by 0.26 percent in Adana. Among the districts of the provinces the study covers, with a rate of 3.72 percent, İstanbul’s district of Pendik saw the highest rise in house prices, as opposed to the Güzelbahçe district of İzmir, where prices declined by 2.94 percent in February over January.
During the same period, rents declined the most drastically in the southwestern province of İzmir, down by 0.83 percent, while Adana saw rents increasing by 0.48 and İstanbul by 0.23 percent. Rents also decreased by 0.67 percent in Bursa, 0.39 percent in Antalya and 0.24 percent in Ankara from January to February.
According to the study, the national composite house sales prices index increased by 0.44 percent last month compared to January and surged by 6.06 percent over the same month of 2009. Rents, on the other hand, dropped by 0.09 percent from January to February, but rose by 2.55 percent when compared to February of last year. House prices have been seeing a moderate increase since the beginning of the second quarter of 2009, thanks partly to incentives -- a cut in title fees and value-added tax (KDV) -- introduced by the government in March to boost sales and support the ailing housing sector, but especially because of a significant fall in mortgage interest rates and attractive promotions launched by firms operating in the market to clear their already large pre-crisis housing inventory.
