Look Inside My Istanbul Home Renovation

turkey has long offered residents to people who buy real estate there and now they offer citizenship as well for folks investing 400 000 US dollars or more today I'm going to share with you the actual results of my property investment in Istanbul [Music] and I think it's important to know the actual numbers that you can be looking at because one of the misconceptions about investing in Turkey is that inflation is so high and so there's no way to make any money the currency has gotten beaten up so badly against the US dollar which these days is exactly anything so unique but hey like how do you make any money and the reality is if you look around different neighborhoods and Istanbul which in my opinion is the one place you should be buying if you want to get real estate in Turkey for an investment purpose if you want to hold on to any value and you aren't just buying it for lifestyle you want to buy an Istanbul and you want to buy in the right neighborhoods in Istanbul if you look at those neighborhoods after inflation was priced in after currency drops were priced in you've seen 30 percent in some very unique cases like 70 Returns on property in the last year or two and so I'm going to walk you through my deal you don't have to get residents or citizenship I didn't necessarily do that but I'm going to talk to you about the numbers and how you can use that and so if it's your first time here not I'm Andrew Henderson I'm the founder of nomadic capitalist we're a boutique consulting firm that helps seven and eight figure entrepreneurs and investors legally go where you're treated best that includes lowering your taxes getting second citizenship and protecting your freedom internationally so I started looking at property in Turkey for a couple of reasons back in 2020 one of the ideas was I have a number of team members friends colleagues who live in that part of the world that are frequently flying through Istanbul airport that have business to do in Turkey we have our own occasional business in Turkey I fly through turkey I thought what a great place to have to save money and we've saved thousands of dollars just this year on people not getting hotels because they're staying in my three bedroom house I found the property after looking a whole bunch of them uh in the deshantoshi neighborhood which is kind of like the Upper East Side there's the basically the Rodeo Drive or the Fifth Avenue of Istanbul runs through this nashantashi neighborhood and so I brought a property in December of 2020 uh for 2.2 million Turkish lira at the time that was about 278 000 US Dollars the exchange rate had gotten stronger against the US dollar so it got that like 7.8 7.9 however what I had been doing was stockpiling some Lira uh you can do that with services like wise it's easier than ever where you basically take your Euros take your dollars take whatever send them to wise in your own personal account and then you can transfer them different currencies you can hold them at different currencies it's not as effective if you just want to if you want to send the money to other countries so for example I hold Thai baht in there I'm building up a Thai baht position and yet I can't send that to my Thai bot account in Singapore originally has to be sent to the country so as long as you can document if you're looking for citizenship that the money is coming from you and you're sending it into your own personal account which will need to open to fund the account you don't send the money from your foreign account directly to the buyer or the seller rather you need to have your own personal account in Turkey so you can generally stockpile Lira or any other currency when it gets particularly weak and then you can deploy that into your own personal account in the country where the investment is and then you can push that money over later and so I was able to save a couple thousand dollars by buying what it was like 8.1 and then I ended up closing at 7.9 and I learned my lesson from not doing that in Malaysia when I bought my first property in Malaysia I bought at the lowest level in 10 years and then when it came time to close 80 of the money get paid at a worse rate and so I learned that lesson anyway paid 2.2 million Turkish lira 278 thousand dollars I renovated it I'm not a a purveyor of Bargains uh I believe in paying to do a good job and so there's just certain touches that I want there's certain things for safety that I want I don't want to screw around uh so I invested 550 000 Turkish lira which came at about 41 000 that did include at certain point we stopped counting some art and Furnishings but that did include certain furnishings and that did includes certain kind of household fixtures so you know you put a cabinet to put your towels in in the bathroom uh I will generally because I like things to kind of fit well have some of that stuff custom made I will say the renovations in Istanbul were relatively straightforward they were relatively fast some of the fastest that I've seen my favorite renovation person of all time was actually in Bogota the extreme level of detail you'll get from certain Colombians and certain people in that part of the world the love love my guy in Colombia but speed and istoma was good there were some things I wish would have been a little bit better but such as the challenge of being an absentee renovator so I gave them the design they executed it took a matter of months and it cost me forty one thousand dollars which again included some Furnishings some fixtures uh some stuff like that um and so I made it for at that point I went to public school 319 000 US Dollars um and so I did this because I thought let me test that in 2020 if someone wants to do this to get citizenship what's the property they're going to buy the property that I bought um initially appraised at a lower number than was needed because what happens is you have to buy it used to be 250 000 US dollars in the Turkish lira equivalent and so you want to give yourself a little wiggle room because exchange rates can fluctuate while you're going from buying the property to get into Conformity certificate but also um the appraisal has to come in and so this is the same thing in Georgia for example except in Turkey the numbers are often further off so in Georgia you might buy a property for 103 000 to get into price at a hundred thousand these are not countries where you simply put the money in because I think they figure there's room for shenanigans and they understand there's plenty of shenanigans going on where people will just buy for 250 and some will be giving them an envelope for 150 so you have to get the the appraisal done and so ultimately we were able to get the appraisal too where it would need to be if you wanted to get citizenship uh now the number is 400 000 US Dollars and the same basic rules apply uh you have to buy the property in Turkish lira and then they convert it at the time that you did the deal and it has to appraise and so you want to make sure before you're buying a property that you're clearing that this is a process that we handle for folks that we're helping get Turkish citizenship because we've been through the process and we've seen the slings and arrows that many people want to pretend don't exist so anyway I meant it for 319 000 and hey that would be a great property uh you know I'm getting a relatively low cap rate using it myself this year but it's been added on my portfolio of homes it's a home but I open up to lots of other people again who are going to get visas of the consulates in Istanbul who are you know they've got a 24-hour labor and Turkish Airlines going somewhere it's been incredibly helpful when I was flying from Bogota to Kuala Lumpur I stopped over for two days got some shopping done went to my favorite uh in The chantashi Bash cache restaurant never missed it once in a decade uh and so 319 000 it's a nice little place to have in one of the world's great hubs if you travel around the world as I do and Istanbul is kind of my My Hub however people would say how did you not lose money well here's the deal we got an appraisal and there's different kinds of appraisals this was this was a softer appraisal so it could be it could be a little bit off but the soft appraisal came in at 7.5 million Turkish lira because what's happened since December of 2020 in the 22 months thereafter is the Lira went from about eight to the dollar to about 18 to the dollar it got it got beaten up again you've seen the British pound and the Euro and to the Lesser except the Swiss franc and the Thai baht and the Malaysian ring it Colombian Peso those have all gotten beaten up and so if you're looking for a place to you know to get good deals these are places to get good deals the currencies are low but people have this idea that oh with inflation you're not making any money so I went from 2.2 plus 550 if we're putting this in Lira terms 2.75 we figured on the renovation some of the stuff I was doing at this price point people wouldn't appreciate I knew I was blowing some money on just stuff that little touches that I personally appreciate I'm a little bit particular about things and so I figured hey all right if I can if I can sell it for 2.6 or whatever you know that'd be a good deal now if you want to hold if you want citizenship you're holding the property for three years this is not a Fix and Flip but um you know I looked at it as can I just maintain my value in dollars and I'll just enjoy the properties a lifestyle property what we've seen is both due to the geopolitical forces both due to the citizenship program being Far and Away the most popular citizenship by investment program in the world now I mean tens of thousands of people are doing it compared to you might have a few hundred in any given Caribbean island in a year prices have gone through the roof and so people are looking for hard assets and if you're buying in the right neighborhoods and if you're buying in second-hand Supply which is very hard to come by these days we're finding it for folks but we're putting in a lot of effort to find good second-hand properties you will at least in many cases I'm not making a promise of an investment return but in many cases you will keep Pace with the dollar and so in my case the renovations again some of that may have been wiped away but generally speaking you can keep Pace with the dollar um I have Pace the dollar because it's 7.5 million Turkish lira now that's 403 000 and so 403 000 on 319 invested I bought in in December of 2020 Renovations were started uh in August 2021 and we finished paying for them uh into 2022. so the money wasn't all put up front but if you just figure as if the money was put up front we figured out it's about a 14 return plus again saved about six thousand dollars in the last 10 months since the renovations were finished enough to where somebody could go and spend time there so um had Mrs H and and um her family there earlier for some stuff they needed had various people from the team and I've used it myself and so I figured the 6000 based on you know if a team member if a lower level colleague who stood the place they wouldn't be staying at the same regions down the street they wouldn't be staying at the Park Hyatt on the street whereas I might have and so I kind of calculated in the different levels so 14 return a year if you are ever laying over in Istanbul or if you ever have any business there if you ever want to go and do shopping there it's generally very affordable uh in terms of places in the world to shop um that was an extra return and so the bottom line is double digit annual return if you want citizenship you would have gotten it for free it does start out with residence permit first and so turkey has always had residence permits for folks who buy property so if you just want a residence for some reason I know folks who just have a residence and and they do that but if you want to go all the way with it you could have brought this property in 2020 and gotten citizenship gotten a Turkish passport now you're not going to have visa-free access to Europe and Turks have been on the record lately saying they feel shut out in that European countries in the shenangen area are making it difficult for them to get visas that's been a big news story so you want to have some other residence permit or some other passport you're going to use to go to Europe if that's important to you but a Turkish passport is going to give you a lot of visa-free travel I mean every single country in South America and Central America and pretty much in the Caribbean and pretty much all of Southeast Asia countries like Japan I mean you're getting access to places that most particularly smaller passports like a Caribbean passport won't give you access to so a Caribbean passport plus a Turkish passport is not a bad way to go necessarily if you just want to knock out your whole second passport strategy at once but the idea I wanted to see with my own money what happened if you bought property with the actual return am I again I just figured hey the Lira probably will go down more and it certainly has but if I can just keep Pace with a dollar then again if you got citizenship you can sell it in three years you can't sell it to another citizenship investor and by the way um in my case they were saying well hey if you want to get more money if you could sell it to a citizenship investor is kind of a turnkey property you could probably get more you'd probably get something like 415 420 you get an extra 15 20 grand they said easy easy deal so to everyone who's concerned about you know the situation in Turkey economically there are still opportunities now if you're just buying some condo in a 50-story building that they're selling at the airport oh you're going to lose 70 of your money in many cases and we've seen that people who are buying stuff in these condos that were 20 minutes outside of anything you know City center-ish I mean back when the program was a million dollars some of those guys can't sell the stuff for 300 Grand and and so that's you know the challenge of getting in into real estate especially in the Caribbean real estate I mean if they lowered the price price who are you going to sell it to the deal with Turkish citizenship by investment is you can't resell it to another citizenship investor and so uh you need to buy a property that can actually resell on its own merits and so in this case uh I think it's not a terrible deal to have a lifestyle property maybe you don't value Istanbul as a hub as much or not as I do but if you're getting a free citizenship plus a 14 return plus your money's Diversified in a much different economy than the countries many of you are from it's definitely something to at least consider it's something that we walk our clients through and you know out of all the different citizenship options that exist and it's one that's worth considering knowing the actual numbers which in this case have not been so bad

Channel: Nomad Capitalist

Views: 70,537

Keywords: nomad capitalist, go where you're treated best, second passport, dual citizenship, second citizenship, andrew henderson, best places to live, life abroad, moving to another country, travel around the world, investing, Results of My Istanbul Home, turkish citizenship, turkey, top questions about turkish citizenship, real estate, invest in turkey, investment, turkish lira, many ways to obtain citizenship, citizenship by investment, living in turkey, Real estate deals, CBI

Id: pSBipb90NMA

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023