The government has been keen to attract inward investment and with the enactment of the Foreign Direct Investment Law that removed the previous restrictions on foreign land ownership. This new law has been challenged in the Constitutional Courts by members of the Republican Peoples Party (RPP). The contention has been that there was a insufficent clarity in subsections of the Foreign Direct Investment Law, and that the act unlawfully abolished long standing restrictions on foreign land ownership.

As a result of the legal challenge, all property sales to foreigners were suspended from the 16th of April. The constitutional court has annulled one article of the Foreign Direct Investment Law that allowed the government the authority to remove the 2.5 hectare limit on individual foreign land ownership.

The ruling of the constitutional court is an embarrassment to a government that has been keen to encourage the growth of tourism, and saw foreign ownership of holiday property as a key method. There are at present over 73,000 foreign owners of land in Turkey, and an increasing property market has seen over one and a half billion of inward investment in the last three years.

The government has acted quickly to resolve the property ownership crisis, by drafting a new parliamentary bill which seeks to overcome the problems raised by the constitutional court. The government is confident that this will soon lead to a resumption of foreign land sales.