Short-Term or Long-Term Letting? An Honest Comparison

"Wouldn't I earn more if I put my flat on Airbnb?" It is the single most common question we get from owners, and overwhelmingly the most common one from owners who live abroad. On paper the answer is tempting: a nightly rate is far more than a thirtieth of the monthly rent. Once you calculate it alongside the permit conditions, realistic occupancy and the operating load, the answer changes for most owners.

This guide compares the two models, including the legal framework that has been in force since the start of 2024. We are not arguing for either. The aim is to give you a frame for seeing which is rational for your own flat.

The legal framework: unpermitted short-term letting is over

Law No. 7464 on the Renting of Residences for Tourism Purposes, in force from 1 January 2024, changed the rules permanently. Any residential letting of 100 days or shorter counts as "tourism-purpose letting" and is subject to the following:

• Permit certificate: before any contract is made, a tourism-letting permit must be obtained from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the plaque issued with it displayed at the entrance to the flat.
• Consent of the other owners: in apartment buildings and complexes, a unanimous decision of every unit owner in the building is required. A single objecting neighbour makes the permit impossible.
• Penalties: unpermitted letting attracts a heavy administrative fine per flat. Set at ₺100,000 when the law came into force, it rises each year with the revaluation rate and escalates on repetition; for those who carry on operating, it can reach seven figures.
• Tax and registration: declaration of the income, guest identity notification and other business-like obligations sit on top.

For anyone hoping to take a shortcut, let us be direct: the era of "I'll quietly list it and nobody will notice" has closed. Complaints arrive through neighbours, and inspections are carried out by scanning the listing sites. Since 1 April 2026 Airbnb itself checks every Turkish listing's permit number and holder name against Ministry records before it will let you host. If that is how you arrived here, with a listing that stopped taking bookings, the practical way out is in Turkey's Airbnb permit: what to do when your listing stops taking bookings. Treat the permit regime as a cost line that belongs on the table when you decide.

For an owner outside Turkey, the unanimity requirement is usually where the idea ends. Getting every owner in a building to sign is difficult when you live in the same block; it is considerably harder to organise from another country.

Comparing income: look at net, not gross

Take a flat in Bahçelievler letting for ₺40,000 a month long-term. Assume you ask ₺3,000 a night short-term. At 100% occupancy the month shows ₺90,000. Here is where the spell breaks:

What the table says is that at realistic occupancy, the net return on short-term letting sits in a band roughly 10–30% above long-term — and can fall below it in a bad season. That difference has to be weighed against the hours and the risk you take on. In tourist centres such as the Sultanahmet–Taksim axis the gap widens; in residential districts like Beylikdüzü or Başakşehir, occupancy often will not even reach the table above.

The real face of short-term letting: you are running a business

With a long-term let you renew a contract once a year. With short-term letting you build a continuously running operation:

• Answering booking messages regardless of time zones
• Organising cleaning, laundry and inspection at every check-in and check-out
• Constantly adjusting prices to the season and the events calendar
• Guest-caused damage, noise complaints and neighbour relations
• Keeping up with official obligations, including guest identity notification

The work can be outsourced; professional operators in Istanbul take roughly a quarter of the income. Once that commission is deducted, the gap against long-term letting narrows to very little in most flats.

Which one makes sense, and when

In our experience the line is drawn clearly.

Short-term letting is worth considering only if all of these hold:

• The flat is in a location with strong tourist demand.
• Unanimity has actually been obtained from every owner in the building.
• The permit process is complete.
• You have either the time to run the operation or an operator you trust.
• Your budget can absorb income that fluctuates.

Long-term letting is clearly the right choice for these profiles:

• Flats bought with a mortgage that need steady cash flow.
• Flats inside managed complexes, where unanimity is close to impossible in practice.
• Owners who live in another city or another country and cannot take on a second job.
• Districts such as Topkapı and Bahçelievler, where demand comes predominantly from settled tenants.

If you are torn, ask yourself one question: do you want this flat to be an investment, or a second business? Run well, short-term letting can produce a higher return, but it is not passive income. Long-term letting looks more modest and is collected on time, with near-zero hours and a predictable calendar. If you want to see how your own flat compares on the numbers, the rental yield calculator will show the gross and net return and the payback period. Istanbul rental yields explained puts those figures in context.

Owners moving back from short-term to long-term

There has been a clear flow in the other direction over the last two years. Many owners who ran their flats on nightly lettings before 2024 could not clear the permit conditions (the unanimity barrier above all) and have moved back to long-term letting. A few practical notes for anyone making that switch.

A furnished flat can be turned into an advantage in the long-term market too; in Istanbul, furnished flats let at a clear premium over their empty equivalents. The tidy, hotel-standard interior you built for short-term guests is a strong asset in listing photographs.

Price expectations, though, have to be reset. An owner looking at long-term rents while still thinking in nightly revenue finds every figure too low, and the flat sits empty for months. The comparison must be made not against last year's gross takings but against the net figure after commission, cleaning, utilities and empty nights. Once that calculation is done, the decision usually becomes obvious on its own. What the long-term process involves from there is set out in renting out your property in Istanbul, and the screening that protects a long tenancy in tenant screening in Turkey.

The middle path: mid-term letting

There is a third option between the two models: furnished mid-term letting of longer than 100 days — in practice from four months upwards. Families needing temporary housing during renovations, visiting academics and students on a semester, and corporate teams arriving for a project all feed this demand. Because the term exceeds one hundred days, it falls outside the tourism-letting permit regime, and it can earn above a standard long-term rent.

The threshold is the critical part: whatever the contract says, any letting of one hundred days or shorter counts as tourism-purpose letting and requires both the permit certificate and unanimous owner consent. A three-month contract therefore does not fall inside this exception — you have to start from four months. Furnished, well-presented flats stand out in this segment.

Do the arithmetic before you decide

Whichever model you choose, the foundation of the decision is your flat's realistic long-term rental value; short-term scenarios can only be judged against that baseline. If you want the current rental band for your area, and a second opinion on which model fits your flat, that is what our free valuation is for. If the flat is in a newly delivered development and this is its first letting, we run the whole process, from the model decision to tenant selection and rent collection, as part of our project sales and leasing work. For owners abroad who choose the long-term route, what happens after the tenant moves in is covered in property management for remote owners.