ESTATE agents, construction companies and building suppliers in the north are reporting an “unbelievable increase” in property sales, confirming reports that a full-scale property frenzy is underway.
“Judging by the number of estate agents springing up around Kyrenia it’s possible that there has been a ten-fold increase in sales over the last 12 to 18 months,” Ian Smith, a Kyrenia estate agent told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
According to figures released by the north’s administration last week, 3,405 new properties – 30 of them holiday complexes – have been built in the last 18 months, the majority of them in the Kyrenia region.
Smith says prices for land have also increased to match skyrocketing demand.
“Take the village of Zeytinlik [Templos], for example. The price of a donum of Turkish land has risen to over ST£40,000 compared to £6,000 12 to 18 months ago.”
Another estate agent, Yakup Yucel of Boray Estates, said: “There has been such a big increase it’s impossible to compare things to the way they were two or three years ago.”
Yucel says his firm sells up to 25 properties a month and that those being sold are increasingly further away from Kyrenia, the epicentre of the boom.
He adds that property prices are “unpredictable” and “vary massively” according to location and whether it has good views.
“Some land in an area near Kyrenia was recently sold for £200,000 a donum,” he says.
Yucel added that price fluctuations came partly as a result of the north’s “unstable economy”, but that prices were “only going up”.
Yucel said nearly all real estate trade in the north centres on Greek Cypriot properties abandoned after the Turkish invasion in 1974.
“There are almost no sales of Turkish Cypriot properties because it is very difficult for foreigners to get permission to buy it.”
In the north, foreigners need permission from the ‘council of ministers’ to purchase property, whether of Turkish or Greek Cypriot in origin.
But figures published by the north’s ‘interior ministry’ last week suggest that foreigners are having to wait years before receiving permission to buy.
According to the figures, there was a five-fold rise in applications between 2002 and 2004 and the number of applications so far this year more than double the total for last year.
A source within the administration said there was currently a backlog of more than 2,000 names waiting to be processed and that so far this year only 19 had been granted.
Last week, ‘interior minister’ Ozkan Murat warned potential buyers not to be pressurised by property sellers into putting up cash for building projects before they had received permission from the authorities.
“These people cannot know whether the permission will be forthcoming, so making that kind of investment before they get permission is very risky,” he said
But such is the buying frenzy that many are putting up the money with only a document drawn up by a lawyer saying the property will revert to them when they get permission to reside in the north.
Kyrenia lawyer Aygun Okray confirmed to the Cyprus Mail that most foreigners were signing contracts with building contractors and sellers despite the risk and the warnings from the ‘ministry’ that such contracts were regarded “legally invalid and a violation of the law”.
The boom in property sales has caused a similar increase in the sales of building materials says Ali Erel, head of the north’s Chamber of Commerce, who owns a company selling and producing building supplies.
“I think the demand for building materials has more than doubled,” he said, adding that prices were stable and that supplies were plentiful.
But not all in the north are pleased with the massive increase in the pace of building. Cemal Yemenici at the Kyrenia municipality planning office said: “Yes, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of building here and we are struggling to keep up with it. There are only three of us and we have to check on every application and make regular checks on every site where building is taking place. It’s actually impossible for us to keep up.”
Environmental groups in the north are also unhappy with the speed at which the development of Kyrenia and surrounding villages is taking place.
The head of the National Trust of North Cyprus said: “They call this progress, but this kind of progress is not what we want to see. I don’t see why we have to follow the rest of the world in destroying the beautiful places we have. It’s all happening too fast.”
The government said yesterday it was monitoring the situation in the north and taking all the necessary measures to solve the problem, said spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides.
Foreign Minister George Iacovou said that the sale of Greek Cypriot properties was not making it easy for negotiations on the Cyprus problem to resume and that the EU was well aware of this.
