Holiday in Alanya, Turkey

I promised my (new) girlfriend a couple of months ago that I would take her on holiday somewhere warm but, what with trying to get the site live, I kept coming up with excuses to keep putting it off.

By the end of July, her patience was wearing a little thin and so I had to arrange something quick and so we ended up going on a last-minute package deal to Alanya in Turkey. Not really my ideal type of holiday, but it was her choice (you know what women are like!)

I had planned to spend quite a bit of time visiting agents and making a video report of my findings, but when I put this to my better half, she told me in no uncertain terms that she would not be at all amused if I spent my time on this, so I don’t have lots of interesting facts and figures to report back.

Alanya is the third biggest destination for foreign buyers and I was surprised to read that it has the highest percentage of foreigners living there in Turkey.

It is quite a cosmopolitan town. Unlike Spain, it is not dominated by the British, but rather there are buyers from all over Europe, especially Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, as well as quite a few Russians and Eastern European.

There isn’t so much prime building land available in Alanya itself any more and so the main developments are happening in satellite towns around Alanya itself such as Avsallar.

Although I believe that Turkey is a market that still offers some good growth potential, I wouldn’t be rushing to invest in property in one of these satellites. They don’t seem to have a lot of character and there’s not a great deal to do there apart from sitting on the beach all day unless you drive into Alanya itself.

I didn't realize it at the time, but yesterday I discovered that I'm not the only one that wasn't too impressed with these satellite towns as news broke that there are now 16,000 unsold homes in the Alanya area. OK, so the situation might not be great there, but I'm really not sure whether I believe the figure of 16,000. Considering the population of Alanya in 2000 was only 88,000, and we can guess that there's about three people per apartment, that means that there were only around 30,000 houses there. OK, so the town has exploded in the last seven years and the population is probably over 100,000 now, but still 16,000 empty apartments still sounds wrong to me.

We did take a couple of excursions, one of which was to the small town of Side. Although we were there less than an hour, I was a lot more impressed with Side than I was Alanya. Side is known for its ancient amphitheatre and this is probably one of the reasons why Side has a more up-market feel to it than Alanya. It is also a lot smaller and there has been a lot less development there to date. Side is also closer to Antalya airport as well.

And the point to this posting is? It’s just to say that, when looking to buy a property in Turkey – or in any other developing market – take a little time to look around at all of the available options. Don’t just leap at the first available opportunity. It’s well worth hiring a car and driving along the coast roads to see what other places are on offer. They are probably going to be a little harder to find because these other resorts are not as heavily marketed as the main locations such as Alanya. But when buying international property, there’s some serious money at stake and so it’s well worth spending time to make sure that you get the location absolutely right if you are looking to make maximum returns on your investment.