If you obtained Turkish citizenship by buying property, your title deed carries an annotation — a şerh — recording that the property will not be sold for three years. It is not a formality. It is the condition on which the citizenship was granted.
Owners who bought in 2021 and early 2022 are reaching the end of that period now, and the questions arrive in a predictable order. Have the three years actually run? Does the restriction come off by itself? If I sell, does anything happen to the passport?
The short answers are: probably not from the date you think, no, and no — provided the timing is right. The longer answers are below, along with the one point most owners in this position get wrong, which is that the year the restriction lifts and the year it makes financial sense to sell are usually not the same year.
What the annotation actually does
The annotation is registered against the property at the Land Registry and restricts disposal: while it stands, the property cannot be sold, transferred or mortgaged. It exists to hold you to the undertaking you gave when you applied.
Two things it does not do are worth stating, because both are widely misunderstood:
- It does not stop you letting the property. Rental income during the three years is entirely permitted, and a great many owners in this cohort have let their flats throughout. If yours has been sitting empty on the assumption that letting was barred too, that was an expensive assumption — see the invisible cost of an empty apartment.
- It does not expire on its own. More on this below, because it is the part that costs people completion dates.
Disposing of the property inside the three years breaches the undertaking and puts the citizenship acquired through it at risk — and not only yours. Where family members were naturalised on the same application, their status rests on the same condition. This is not a rule to test on someone's guess about when the clock started.
When the three years actually start
Not on the day you bought. Not on the day your citizenship was approved.
The period runs from the date the annotation was registered at the Land Registry. In practice that date sits somewhere between the purchase and the citizenship decision, and it can be months away from either. Owners who count three years from the tapu date routinely arrive at the registry early and are turned away — and owners who count from the citizenship decision sometimes wait the better part of a year longer than they needed to.
Find the date on the deed itself, or ask the Land Registry Directorate where the property is registered. This is a five-minute check that determines everything after it, so do it before you speak to an agent, agree a price, or promise a buyer a completion date.
The restriction does not remove itself
This is the single most useful thing on this page.
When the three years are up, the annotation stays on the title deed until you apply to have it removed. There is no automatic expiry, no notification, and no quiet cleanup at the registry. The application is made to the Land Registry Directorate for the district where the property is registered, and in ordinary circumstances the removal itself is quick once accepted — a matter of a few business days, subject to that office's workload.
What this means in practice:
- Verify, do not assume. Before marketing the property, get an updated title deed record showing the annotation gone. "Three years have passed" is not the same statement as "the deed is clear", and only the second one lets a sale complete.
- Start it before you need it. An owner who lists in March, agrees a sale in April and then discovers the annotation is still on the deed has a problem with a date attached to it.
- Check what your power of attorney covers. If you are handling this from abroad through a representative, a power drafted to sell the property may not expressly authorise an application to remove an annotation. Those are different acts. Have whoever drafts it cover both, rather than discovering the gap at the counter.
Year three is rarely the year to sell
Here is the tension nobody mentions when the restriction lifts.
The annotation runs for three years. Turkey's capital gains exemption on property arrives at five. Sell more than five full years after you acquired the property and the gain falls outside income tax entirely, however large it is. Sell inside five years and it is taxable.
So the 2021 and 2022 citizenship cohort is, right now, largely sitting in the gap: free to sell, but still inside the taxable window. An owner three years and two months in is looking at a taxable disposal. The same owner, waiting until the five-year mark, may be looking at no tax on the gain at all.
That is not automatically an argument for waiting. The gain may be small once the acquisition cost is indexed forward — in a high-inflation decade the indexation does a great deal of work, and plenty of disposals that look enormous in lira turn out to show a modest real gain. It may also be that you want the capital now, or that you take a view on where prices are going. But it is a calculation to run deliberately rather than a detail to discover afterwards.
The mechanics — how the taxable gain is built, how Yİ-ÜFE indexation applies, what is deductible, and the short filing deadline that catches non-residents out — are set out in full in selling your Istanbul property while you live abroad. Read that section before you decide the timing, and get your own figures from a Turkish accountant rather than from any general guide.
What the market you are selling into looks like
Two facts worth holding together. Prices have risen substantially in lira. Measured in real terms, after inflation, they have not — and for an owner who bought in dollars at the top of the citizenship boom, the currency has done its own work on the outcome.
This is why the honest first step is not an agent's opinion of what your flat is worth but a defensible comparison against what has actually sold nearby. If the number surprises you in either direction, that is exactly the information you needed before committing to a date. That is what our free valuation is for, and it is not an SPK-licensed valuation report — the separate report required at the registry is covered in the selling guide above.
Then the ordinary business of selling from abroad
Once the annotation is gone and the timing is settled, the rest is the same transaction any non-resident seller faces, and we have written it out in one place rather than repeating it here. In outline it involves the valuation report the registry will ask for, tapu harcı and the convention on who pays it, the currency-conversion certificate, moving the proceeds out afterwards, and a properly drafted power of attorney so you never have to fly in. If there is a tenant in the flat, that has its own answer too, and it is not "wait for them to leave".
All of it, in order and with the parts that go wrong flagged: selling your Istanbul property while you live abroad.
A sequence that works
- Find the annotation's registration date. Everything depends on it and nothing else can start until you have it.
- Work out where you sit against the five-year mark, and decide the timing on the numbers rather than on the restriction lifting.
- Apply to remove the annotation, and obtain an updated deed record confirming it is gone.
- Get a realistic price from actual comparables, not from what the flat cost in dollars in 2021.
- Put the paperwork in place — power of attorney covering both the removal and the sale, tax number current, municipal arrears cleared.
- Then go to market, with a completion date you can actually keep.
If you are somewhere in that sequence and want to know what the flat is worth before deciding whether to sell at all, tell us where the property is and where you are — we work with owners who are not in the country as a matter of routine, and the letting option stays open if the sale arithmetic does not persuade you.