The Turkish government has been keen to attract foreign investment and has previously relaxed elements of Turkeys restrictive property ownership laws with the enactment of the Foreign Direct Investment Law (FDI) which placed no restrictions on foreign property ownership. This new law has been challenged in the Constitutional Court by 2 deputies in the Republican Peoples Party, arguing that there was a lack of clarity in subsections of the Foreign Direct Investment Law, and that the act unlawfully abolished long standing restrictions on foreign ownership.

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

The constitutional courts ruling, is an embarrassment to a government that has been eager to encourage the growth of tourism, and saw foreign ownership of resort property as a prime method. The foreign property investment market has seen over one and a half billion of inward investment in the last 3 years alone.

A new act of parliament that seeks to overcome the issues raised by the court has been written, and the government is hopeful that this will very soon lead to a resumption of foreign property sales.