It's summertime in Istanbul and that means many things for a lot of people: sipping tea by the seaside, long walks by the Bosphorous, late nights at an outdoor meyhane, moving house.
Summer is prime moving season, so I find it appropriate that I am moved more now than ever to write about the messed up real estate situation in this country.
I'm sorry; I really do try to be positive about the differences I come across in Turkey, but sometimes...sometimes...I just...can't....help....it.
In this case, my topic is about emlakçıs, or real estate agents.
Ugh. I shudder at the thought.
In most places real estate agents perform a somewhat valuable service for sellers and buyers of property. They fill out all the paperwork, saving you the time of learning how to figure out property law, and make things a heck of a lot easier. Of course, most times you pay a pretty penny for their services.
In Turkey, a renter pays quite the fee to a real estate agent for booking an apartment: one month's rent to be exact. For doing nothing more than holding a key and opening the door for you, the renter is expected to pony up what is, essentially, the finder's fee.
Let me show you how this might work. Let's say you're walking around the neighborhood in which you would like to live. This is how many people looking for apartments find one: by walking around and scoping out signs that look like this:
You see the sign, the apartment is on a nice street, so you call the number for the emlak (real estate company). The agent tells you it's a one-bedroom apartment with an open kitchen, 80 metres squared, for 1300 TL a month. Okay, you think, let's see it.
The real estate agent comes over in five minutes, unlocks the door and lets you in. Here's the kitchen, the agent says, and here's the salon. The washing machine goes here, he points out.
You like the apartment. You ask what is required to rent it. The first month's rent and a security deposit, the agent tells you. If the rent is 1300 TL, that's 2600 TL.
Ah, but you're forgetting something: the real estate agent fee, which will be another 1300 TL. So now you're shelling out 3900 TL to rent the apartment.
Does this make sense to you? Because it doesn't make sense to me.
In the US, if you hire a real estate agent, you work with that one agent to show you dozens of properties. You pay this agent a fee when you finally decide to buy property. (Most people in the US don't work with real estate agents to rent property). In Turkey, you might work with eight agents, all of whom show you one single property that you are interested in.
On principle, I can see paying a real estate agent who has shown me 12 apartments, but I can't see paying the one agent who happened to show me the one apartment I ended up taking. It just doesn't make sense to me.
Well, what does the landlord pay, you ask? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. See, the real estate agent isn't working for the landlord; in this system, he's working for you.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Is this how the system works everywhere else in the world? Is America the anomoly here?
