The government of Turkey has been eager to attract foreign investment and has previously relaxed elements of Turkeys restrictive property ownership laws with the enactment of the Foreign Direct Investment Law that removed restrictions on foreign property ownership. This new bill has been challenged in the Constitutional Court by two deputies in the Republican Peoples Party, arguing that there was insufficient clarity in subsections of the Foreign Direct Investment Law, and that the act unlawfully abolished long held 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 annulled a single article of the FDI Law that allowed the government the authority to remove the 2.5 hectare limit on individual foreign property ownership.

The decision of the constitutional court is an embarrassment to a government that has been eager to support the increase in tourism, and saw foreign ownership of resort property as a prime method. There are at present over 73,000 foreign owners of property in Turkey, and an increasing property market has seen over one and a half billion of foreign investment in the previous three years.

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