I have seen a lot of purchases of Turkish propertyin my time, a lot of them have gone quite well and some of them have turned out to be very stressful for the buyer. There is one mistake however that I have seen 99% of customers make, they choose their estate agent dependent on the property they want to buy.

Of course they would you might say, they are not going to buy a overseas propertythey don't want just because the agent is good. Now this is where I can prove my point, if the agent can not find you the property you want then they are either not experienced in the market for that area or they are not established and you could end up being their guinea pig customer. That is unless of course your expectations are so high that you expect a three bedroom villa for £30,000!

You have to remember the estate agent business is so different here in Turkey. We need a license to operate as an estate agent however there is no criteria for us to fulfill by law, we do not have to sit any exams and the license is given upon payment. Such is common practice as well, is they will learn as they go.

So sitting there for hours trawling through website after website should not be the first step. You first step should be assessing the agent and sorting out the best from the rest. Don't overwhelm yourself and end up with pages and pages of websites, Stick to 15 agents as your starting list and follow the tips to sort out the best from the rest. Aim to end up with the top three best agents.

1 - Review the agents website. Is it neatly maintained?,is all information up to date?, are the pictures of good quality?. If the agent can not be bothered to keep his website up to date and looking good then he sure isn't going to look after you as a customer.

2 - Send the agent a general enquiry form. State your requirements that you are looking for in a property and your budget. Wait for the response. You should not have to wait any longer than 48 hours. Review the quality of the response. Is it professional and informative?

3 - Ask to receive a telephone call at a certain time from the agent. Have a list of questions ready to ask them. Use that telephone call to establish whether you can do business with this company, do the staff know what they are talking about?

4 - Type the company name into Google and review all the results. If you struggle to find results then the agent is not established.

5 - Find forums for the area that you are looking to buy into, join one and ask people if anyone else has dealt with them. At this point I do have to say that I am very weary of forums that allow members to talk about estate agents and do not give the agent chance to respond, either good reviews or bad.

6 - Ask for previous customers telephone numbers and names. Actually ring these people to ensure that it is not a fake list.


7- Ask for copies of the estate agents licenses and identity cards. They should be able to fax them or scan and email them to you. You will need these should you decide to do business with them.

At this stage you should of discarded quite a few agents that did not fit the bill and you can move onto the next stage which is actually meeting your remaining agents, whether you do this via a viewing trip or make an appointment and arrange your own travel arrangements. So really the golden rule is find your estate agent first, then investigate potential properties.