Every guide to buying in Turkey, including several on this site, tells you to insist on the iskân and to prefer kat mülkiyeti over kat irtifakı. Almost none of them tells you what those words do in law, how one status turns into the other, what a foreign owner can do about it alone, and which doors each status opens or closes. That gap is where my clients' problems live. A buyer who understands that the register can hold the same flat in three different legal shapes, and that the shape decides whether the flat qualifies for citizenship, for a tourism letting permit, for a mortgage and for a water meter, negotiates differently. This page is the mechanism, from the Condominium Law and the Zoning Law as they stand in September 2026.
Sources, checked 9 September 2026. Condominium Law No. 634, Articles 1, 2, 3, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 26 and 49; Zoning Law No. 3194, Articles 30, 31 and 32 and Provisional Article 16; Regulation on the Implementation of the Turkish Citizenship Law, Article 20(2)(b) as amended by Presidential Decision 5072 (Official Gazette 31711, 6 January 2022); Consumer Protection Law No. 6502, Articles 40 to 45; Law No. 7464 and its Regulation, Article 5(2)(c); Disaster Insurance Law No. 6305, Article 10.
Three shapes the same flat can take on the register
Turkish land registry entries describe a property by its type, its share and its annotations. For a flat in an apartment building, the entry falls into one of three legal shapes, and the difference between them is not administrative polish; it is the difference between owning a flat and owning a fraction of a plot with a promise attached.
| What the tapu shows | What you legally own | Statutory basis | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| A share of land ("arsa", with a fraction), no unit number | A co-ownership share in the plot under the Civil Code; the "flat" is an arrangement among co-owners, not a registered unit | Civil Code co-ownership rules; Condominium Law not engaged | Any co-owner may sue for partition; the building's legal existence depends on separate permits; lenders and most public procedures treat you as a landowner, not a flat owner |
| Kat irtifakı (construction servitude) with a unit number | A land share plus a registered servitude entitling you to a specific unit of a building to be built or completed, per an approved project | Condominium Law Art. 1(2), 2(c), 3(3), 14 | The unit exists on the project and in the declarations column, not yet as a separate immovable; conversion depends on the occupancy certificate |
| Kat mülkiyeti (condominium ownership) | Independent ownership of the unit, with its land share and rights in common parts, on its own register page | Condominium Law Art. 1(1), 3(1), 10, 12, 13 | The unit is a separate immovable; the building has passed the occupancy stage; management, insurance, letting and transfer procedures run without further conditions |
Article 1 of the Condominium Law states the two regimes in two sentences. On a completed building, independent ownership may be created over the parts that can be used separately. On a building under construction or yet to be built, servitudes may be created over the same future parts, "to serve as the basis of the condominium ownership to be passed to after the building is completed". Article 3(3), as rewritten in 2009, calls kat irtifakı a servitude tied to the land share and says it is converted to kat mülkiyeti ex officio, on the basis of the occupancy certificate issued for the whole building. Kat irtifakı is therefore not a defective title. It is a title with a condition attached, and the condition is the iskân.
The iskân: what Article 30 actually says
The occupancy certificate, in the statute the yapı kullanma izni, is issued under Article 30 of the Zoning Law by the same municipality or governorate that issued the building permit, once the building is finished or once separately usable parts of it are finished. The owner applies; the authority must establish that the building conforms to the permit and its annexes and that there is no technical objection to its use. The article gives the authority thirty days to decide, and it says in terms that if the thirty days pass without a decision, permission to use the completed building or part is deemed granted. It also says, in its last paragraph, that the certificate does not relieve the owner of liability for breaches of the law or the permit, and does not relieve anyone of taxes and fees.
Article 31 is the sanction that makes the certificate matter to a buyer. Completion is dated from the day the certificate is issued, and a building without one is not connected to electricity, water or sewerage until it is; only units that hold a certificate are served. Article 32, since 2020, adds the annotation: where a building is found to be without a permit or contrary to it, the authority notifies the land registry within seven days for entry in the declarations column, and the entry cannot be removed until the authority confirms the breach has been cured. That is the line I look for first when a title record arrives from a seller who says the building "is fine, it just never applied".
Two consequences follow for a buyer. A building can be legally complete without ever having been converted to kat mülkiyeti, because conversion is a registry step; the certificate is what matters, and the conversion follows from it. And a building can be physically complete, fully inhabited and connected through temporary or irregular arrangements without a certificate, in which case every flat in it is a kat irtifakı unit whose condition has failed, whatever the sales brochure called it.
How kat irtifakı becomes kat mülkiyeti, and who can force it
The conversion machinery has been rebuilt three times, each time to take the step out of the developer's hands.
Under Article 3(3), the conversion to kat mülkiyeti is made ex officio on the basis of the occupancy certificate for the whole building, and the article adds that the step may be carried out "even at the request of the land owner or of one of the co-owners holding a construction servitude". A foreign owner of one flat in a building that has its certificate does not need the developer, the manager or the neighbours to apply; the request of one servitude holder is enough.
Under Article 10, as amended in 2018 and 2021, two further steps run without the owners' signatures. Where a developer built under a construction-for-shares contract or a notarised division agreement, the developer may have the servitude and the condominium established by the administration on the strength of the approved architectural project and management plan, without the owners signing either document. And since 2021, the change of the property's registered type from land to building is made ex officio: the authority that issues the occupancy certificate uploads it to the spatial address system, the cadastre office prepares the registration notice, and the land registry records the change without any further document.
Article 12 lists what the conversion file consists of: the architectural project approved by the competent authority and sent electronically to the land registry, showing the units, annexes, common parts and the land shares proportional to each unit's value, together with the occupancy certificate; and a management plan. Article 14 adds that no new management plan is required at conversion where one was filed when the servitude was established.
The practical reading for a buyer is this. If the building has its certificate and the register still says kat irtifakı, the gap is a registry step you can take yourself. If the building has no certificate, no registry step will help, and you are buying the condition, not the flat.
When the building never gets its certificate
Four provisions decide what a kat irtifakı owner is left with in a building that stalls.
Article 17(3) of the Condominium Law is the kindest: where the building is in fact complete and two thirds of the units are in actual use, the management rules of condominium ownership apply even though conversion has not taken place. The owners can hold meetings, appoint a manager and collect contributions as if the conversion had happened.
Article 26 is the harshest, and foreign owners abroad should read it carefully. Servitude holders owe one another the performance of their obligations for the completion of the building. If one of them fails to perform after a notarised warning and does not cure within two months, the others may ask the court to transfer that owner's land share and servitude to them, in proportion to their shares, against its value at the date nearest to the judgment. An owner who stops paying construction contributions because the developer disappeared, and who does not answer the notary's letter, can lose the share to the neighbours who kept paying.
Article 49(3) puts a clock on the servitude itself. If no building is erected within five years of the servitude's establishment according to the project filed, any owner may ask the peace court to terminate the servitude or extend the period; extensions may be renewed. A kat irtifakı that is older than five years on an empty or half-built plot is not a settled position.
And Article 32 of the Zoning Law governs the building that was put up wrongly: sealing, one month to cure or obtain a permit, and demolition at the owner's cost if neither happens.
There is one statutory way around a missing certificate, and it is closed to most of the buildings a foreign buyer looks at. Provisional Article 16 of the Zoning Law, the 2018 building amnesty, allowed buildings completed before 31 December 2017 to obtain a building registration certificate on the owner's declaration and a fee. The certificate is valid until the building is rebuilt or enters transformation, permits temporary utility connections, and, where all owners consent and the areas reserved for public services in the plan are ceded, allows the change of type and the establishment of kat mülkiyeti without an occupancy certificate, against double the registration fee. The amnesty did not apply in the Bosphorus shoreline and foreground zone, in the mapped parts of Istanbul's historic peninsula or in the Gallipoli historic area, and it does not apply to anything built after 2017. A registration certificate is also not a permit: it records the building as it stands, and the transformation law applies to it in full, which is why the earthquake law page matters for exactly these buildings.
Where each status opens or closes a door for a foreign buyer
The register status is not an abstraction; four procedures foreign buyers actually use are keyed to it.
Citizenship by investment. Article 20(2)(b) of the Regulation on the Turkish Citizenship Law, in the wording set by Presidential Decision 5072 of January 2022, requires the property to have kat mülkiyeti or kat irtifakı established, or to be land with a building on it, and the notarised promise-of-sale route is open only for property with kat mülkiyeti or kat irtifakı established and the full price paid in advance. A share of land with a flat allocated by private arrangement does not fit the wording. The rest of the route is on the citizenship by real estate page.
Tourism letting. The permit under Law 7464 requires, under Article 5(2)(c) of its regulation, a current title record showing the unit as a residence with kat irtifakı or kat mülkiyeti, or, for units without either, a building registration certificate issued for a residence. A land share does not qualify, and the rest of that regime is on the short-term rental law page.
Compulsory earthquake insurance. Article 10 of Law 6305 covers independent units under the Condominium Law, which includes kat irtifakı units, and residential buildings on private land. A policy can be issued on either status, but the insurer may refuse buildings built contrary to the project, which is a description of many buildings that never obtained a certificate.
Utilities and lending. Article 31 of the Zoning Law is the law on utilities. Lending is not governed by statute at all; whether a bank advances money against a kat irtifakı unit is the bank's credit policy, and most Turkish banks lend against kat irtifakı in projects under construction and decline units in buildings that stalled without a certificate. Treat any promise about financing as a promise about a particular bank on a particular day.
Buying before completion: the consumer law clocks
Most kat irtifakı purchases by foreigners are off-plan purchases from a developer, and the Consumer Protection Law adds a layer of its own. Under Article 40(3) of Law 6502, no pre-paid housing sale contract may be made with a consumer before the building permit has been issued. Under Article 41, the sale must be registered at the land registry or made as a notarised promise of sale, and the seller may not take any payment or any document creating a debt before a valid contract exists. Under Article 42, projects above the size the Ministry sets must carry building completion insurance or an equivalent security before sales begin. Article 43 gives the consumer fourteen days to withdraw without reason; Article 44, as amended in 2022, requires delivery within the contractual period and in any event within forty-eight months of the contract, and treats registration of the servitude in the consumer's name together with possession as delivery; Article 45 allows the consumer to terminate without reason within twenty-four months against compensation rising from two to eight per cent of the price by the age of the contract, with nothing payable where the seller has failed to perform, and refunds due within one hundred and eighty days. A foreign buyer who signs a private reservation form and wires a deposit before the permit exists has stepped outside all of this; the structure of an off-plan file is the subject of a separate page.
Before you pay: the checks in order
- Read the type line of the title record: land with a fraction, kat irtifakı with a unit number, or kat mülkiyeti. Each is a different purchase.
- Read the declarations column for the three entries that matter: a zoning breach under Article 32, a risky-building entry under Law 6306, and any construction-for-shares contract annotated by the developer.
- Ask the municipality for the occupancy certificate, its date and its scope; a partial certificate covers only the parts it names, and Article 31 serves only those parts.
- If the building has a certificate but the register says kat irtifakı, plan the conversion request yourself under Article 3(3); it does not need anyone else's signature.
- If the building has no certificate, ask when the permit was issued, whether a registration certificate exists under the amnesty, and whether the five-year period in Article 49 has run; these answers decide whether you are buying a delay or a dispute.
- Obtain the approved project and the management plan under Article 12, and compare the unit you are shown with the unit on the project; the number, the floor and the annexes must match.
- Check whether Article 17(3) already applies, which tells you whether the building is being managed as a condominium in fact and whether contributions are being collected.
- Confirm that the status fits the procedure you are buying for: citizenship, letting, insurance or a mortgage from a named lender.
The wider purchase checks, including the ownership rules for your nationality and the location, are on the general buying guide and the due diligence page; the Istanbul and Antalya markets have their own patterns, on the Istanbul page and the Antalya page. If you are buying land to build rather than a unit, the permit clocks are on the land page. Owners comparing with the Adriatic will find that Montenegro asks the same question through the legality status of the building recorded in the cadastre folio rather than through a servitude stage; the mechanics are on the Montenegro purchase process page.
Whose side we are on, and how we are paid
The person explaining the title to a foreign buyer is usually the person selling it. The agent is paid at the deed, the developer is paid on the instalment schedule, and both have an interest in the word "temporary" doing a lot of work in the sentence "the kat irtifakı is temporary, the kat mülkiyeti comes later". Sometimes it does come later. Whether it can is a question about the certificate, and the certificate is a question for the municipality, not for the sales office.
We take no commission from developers, agents or lenders, in any form, on any file. The fee you pay us is our only income from your matter, and it does not rise if you buy. Because our position does not move with the sale, telling you that the building has no certificate and no realistic route to one, or that the flat you were shown is not the unit on the project, costs us nothing to say.
One boundary, stated plainly. We are lawyers, not licensed investment advisers and not engineers. We do not tell you whether the flat will gain value or whether the building is well built. What we protect is the legal position: the shape of the title, the condition attached to it, and the procedures that depend on it.
Before the deposit
Send us the title record, the unit number you have been offered and the developer's name. We will tell you which of the three shapes you are being sold, whether the building has its certificate, what stands between the current entry and kat mülkiyeti, and whether the status fits what you want the flat for. Our Turkish property work is described on the Turkey real estate page.
What this page does not settle
The full regime of off-plan sales, including the completion insurance thresholds and what happens when the developer fails, is a separate page. Property tax and transfer fee consequences of each status are not covered here. Lending criteria are commercial and change bank by bank.
