Short-term rental income has been one of the main draws for Russian buyers acquiring apartments in Antalya, Alanya, and Istanbul over the past several years. A unit purchased for personal use for part of the year and rented out on platforms such as Airbnb or Booking.com the rest of the time has looked, on paper, like an efficient way to offset carrying costs. That picture changed materially with the daily rental regulation that came into force in 2024, and Russian investors who bought before the law, or who are evaluating a purchase now with rental income in mind, need to understand the new compliance layer before assuming any yield figures.
The New Licensing Framework
Türkiye's daily rental law, formalized under an amendment to the tourism legislation, requires anyone renting a residential unit on a short-term basis, generally defined as stays under one hundred days, to hold a permit issued jointly by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the relevant provincial authority. This is a meaningful shift from the prior environment, where short-term letting operated in a legal gray zone with limited enforcement.
Two conditions sit at the center of the permit process. First, the building must be structurally eligible: mixed-use buildings with insufficient safety infrastructure, or buildings where short-term rental would exceed a certain density threshold relative to total units, may be excluded outright. Second, and more consequential in practice, the building's other residents, through the site management or condominium board, must formally consent to the unit being used for daily rental. Unanimous consent from all flat owners in the building is the standard requirement in most municipalities, which in practice has proven to be the single largest obstacle for individual investors in multi-unit apartment blocks.
Practical impact : A Russian owner with one unit in a fifty-unit building effectively needs the cooperation of forty-nine other households to legally operate a daily rental. In buildings with high owner-occupancy or conservative management boards, this consent is frequently withheld, regardless of the unit owner's compliance intentions.
Penalties and Enforcement
Operating without a permit is no longer a low-risk activity. Fines for unlicensed short-term letting are substantial on a per-incident basis and escalate for repeat violations, and platforms operating in Türkiye are under increasing pressure to verify listing legality before publishing. Buyers who assume they can simply continue advertising informally, as was common practice before 2024, are exposed to both financial penalty and the more disruptive risk of forced removal of a listing mid-season.
What This Means for Underwriting
For Russian investors evaluating a purchase with short-term rental as the primary income thesis, the permit question needs to move earlier in the due diligence sequence, ideally before an offer is made rather than after closing. Practical steps include:
Building selection : Favor developments explicitly marketed and structured for daily rental use, where the developer has secured or streamlined consent mechanisms as part of the sales process, over older residential stock with an unpredictable ownership base.
Verification before purchase : Request written confirmation, or at minimum a clear management-board position, on daily rental status before committing. A unit that cannot legally be let short-term is, for underwriting purposes, a long-term rental asset with a different yield profile entirely.
Fallback modeling : Any pro forma should include a long-term lease scenario as the base case, with short-term income treated as an upside that depends on permit approval, not a guaranteed baseline.
A Broader Pattern
The daily rental law reflects a wider regulatory trend across Türkiye's residential sector: formalization of activities that were previously loosely governed, generally accompanied by higher compliance costs and clearer documentation requirements. For Russian buyers used to navigating regulatory ambiguity as a matter of course, the more useful mental model is that Türkiye's short-term rental market is converging toward the licensing regimes already familiar from Western European tourism cities, and the properties that will perform best going forward are those bought with that framework in mind from the outset, not retrofitted to it after the fact.
Investors already holding units purchased for daily rental purposes should treat a permit status review as a near-term priority, both to avoid penalty exposure and to reset return expectations against what is now a licensed, and more restricted, category of use.