Getting a House for Free

[Colwyn]

I wondered how common this was in Turkey since I have some friends who did just this and said they thought it was commonplace. This is how it works. You buy a plot of land big enough for two houses. A builder builds these two for you and then - this is the clever bit - gives you yours for nothing! In return he gets the other house and, when he sells it, that's his profit on the job. Has anybody/everybody come across this, or is it local to a particular area?

[JohnF]

It's a common practice in Turkey, especially where large tracts of land are involved. Hence the amount of litigation round the corner because builders didn't keep their promises or the landowners were unable to get the right price for the properties.

JF

[KKOB]

It's not unusual. As the Valley Boy used to sing.

[Scunner]

Many of the smaller new developments in Calis were done this way. It is a very clever scheme. You have a builder with no land to build on, and a landowner with prime land but no money to do anything with it.

[nichola]

I have a friend in Ovacık that did just that.

She now has a lovely house and the builder presumably sold the other house he built.

Pretty good scheme   

[Liz 101]

Lemon 1 was built in this way. The builder gave apartments to the original landowners, which they have rented out for the last 12 years. The balance of the apartments were sold.