The problem of renting housing, which has escalated to the limit, primarily concerns the province of Antalya and key cities on its territory: after all, most of the new settlers have been coming here since February. Alanya turned out to be the place where, as the construction market players have long promised, the «rental bubble» burst first due to the fact that the growth of rental rates cannot be contained.
We are talking about exorbitantly inflated prices for rent since February, when a flood of Russians and Ukrainians poured into Turkey, and into Antalya and Alanya, including: to rent apartments and apply for a residence permit.
Tourists and emigrants who at first willingly paid for residences as much as they would say – just to settle in – eventually found that they overpay four or five times compared to locals.
Now some people simply move out, returning to their homeland (in particular, Ukrainians, in whose cities it is quieter), or are looking for housing much cheaper. Or they refuse to vacate the residences and pay, referring to fraud.
President of the Association of Real Estate Agents of Alanya (ALEMDER) Ozgur Erbash said that the owners of apartments and houses are filing applications to the court one by one. In general, about 40% of owners renting residential real estate complain about their problems with tenants.
Tenants can also be understood: an overpayment of five times is far from the limit. In Alanya, there are cases when an apartment that costs 2-3 thousand Turkish lira (TL) per month was rented for 20,00-30,000 TL. After learning about this, tenants-residents of other countries began to demand justice and protest as much as they could.
Mr. Erbash said that for dishonest owners who decided to cash in on someone else's misfortune, this is a click on the nose: «A good lesson for landlords who did not support a local tenant and rented their house to a foreigner because of greed for money».
Tourists move out and the Turks, who have already faced overstated rates by dozens of times, do not turn to the same landlords again, taught by bitter experience.
So, in Alanya, the rental amounts, which reached EUR 1,500 per month, began to decline quite quickly, and prices stabilized. If the authorities are puzzled to balance tariffs in Turkish lira and dollars/euros, the situation will normalize even faster; and at least the exorbitant price growth will stop.
Mustafa Kucyuker, Chairman of the Alanya Contractors Association (MÜTBIR), stressed that homeowners should not have profited from those who became victims of the armed conflict. Now, the most correct thing would be to settle all disputed issues in the legal field. According to Mustafa Kucyuker, the situation with prices and the state of the rental market in Alanya can be more clearly imagined by September-October.
The Istanbul Chamber of Realtors also predicts a reduction in rental rates of up to 40%.