Turkey's New Condominium Law: New Concepts Address Old Problems

The Turkish real estate market has experienced explosive growth over the past few years. Construction of numerous shopping malls and multi-family residential developments and planned communities has made condominium ownership one of the most important practice areas of real estate law. Those familiar with the concept of condominiums, with general and limited common elements and with strata title regimes, will find both long-established, as well as unique, provisions in Turkey's new condominium law.

The provisions and regulations of Condominium Law No. 634, enacted more than forty years ago, were no longer adequate for today's real estate world. The Turkish Grand National Assembly recently passed Law No. 5711 to meet the needs of the modern, sophisticated development climate, extensively amending Condominium Law No. 634. The new Law No. 5711 was published in the Official Gazette on 28 November 2007 and numbered 26714.

Law No. 5711 changes the scope of condominium ownership from a single parcel/single building basis to a collective building/collective property basis with the introduction of updated concepts of common areas, management of the building(s), and individual unit owners cooperating in the payment of common expenses. In these respects, the new law is more in line with the legal regime found for condominiums in jurisdictions like the US, Canada, and certain countries in Western Europe. A more local and physically relevant change is the requirement to construct safe and technically acceptable buildings for today's Turkey, by analyzing the natural disaster risks (e.g. seismic), and requiring owners to take the steps necessary to make structural and other health/safety improvements to vulnerable buildings.

The new collective building concept addressed in Law No. 5711 brings special new provisions to clarify the definition of common areas of the collective buildings, and solves the ownership issues relating to the common areas. Plot, block, and parcel numbers of all parcels in the collective buildings will be annotated to the records of those parcels, which are designated for the common use of all of the independent unit owners. By this annotation, all independent unit owners will be able to use the common areas even if an independent unit is located in a building or on a parcel other than the one on which the respective common area is located.

Law No. 5711 also introduces new terms for the management boards of the buildings (e.g. flat...