Beyond luck: The key to profitable residential real estate investments for individual investors in Türkiye

Individual residential investors are influenced by the media and their environment in their investment preferences, as they lack the experience of property investors and professional residential investors. Concerns about regret, fears of further property price rises and social circumstances put pressure on investors. Under these conditions, are individual housing investors seeing all the opportunities in the housing market? What types of buyers are taking advantage of these opportunities? This study aims to create tools to help individual residential investors identify opportunity periods in the market, analyse such opportunities retrospectively and test consumer behaviours in response to these opportunities. We analysed the opportunity for access to housing, the opportunity of lower loan interest rates and the opportunity of lower housing prices in Türkiye in the 120 months between 2013 and 2022 using the income-housing price scale. We analysed residential sales (total, credit and cash) in the opportunity periods resulting from the equations set up for the opportunity periods. We tested the criteria for selecting opportunity periods using the analysis of variation (ANOVA) method. We analysed changes in consumer preferences for credit and cash home purchases during periods of opportunity. We found that residential investors did not use the opportunity of accessing residential properties, and that cash home buyers used the opportunities of residential loan interest rates and residential price declines.