An owner who does not sign the redevelopment agreement in a Turkish urban transformation project does not block the project: the co-owners holding the absolute majority of shares decide, and Article 6/1 of the Law No. 6306 on the Transformation of Areas at Disaster Risk directs that the land share of a non-signing owner is put up for open auction. What changed on 4 February 2026 is the procedure around that outcome: the amendment to the Implementing Regulation published in the Official Gazette of that date, issue 33158, added a formal owners’ meeting with a signed record, made the meeting papers a compulsory part of the forced-sale file, tightened the notice that has to reach a repeat auction, and made the registry record on the title, once the risky-building annotation comes off after demolition, that the property is within the scope of the Law.
For a resident owner these are procedural adjustments. For an owner living outside Türkiye they are the difference between finding out in time and finding out from a new title record. The service routes the Law and the Regulation use (a registered electronic notification address, the e-Devlet gateway, a notary, a posting at the muhtarlık) carry no requirement to put an envelope through a door in London, Riyadh or Berlin.
What the 4 February 2026 Amendment Actually Did
The amendment is short and consists of nine articles, all in force on the day of publication. Five of them matter to an individual owner.
| Provision amended | Position before | Position from 4 February 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Reg. art. 8/9: removal of the risky-building annotation | Annotation removed after demolition on the request of an interested party or on notification by the Presidency or the administration; work on the parcel continued under the Law | Removed as before, then a note is entered in the declarations column recording that the property is within the scope of Law No. 6306, and work on the parcel continues under the Law |
| Reg. art. 15(2): how the decision is taken | No meeting procedure; the decision of the absolute majority could be evidenced by signed minutes or by the agreeing owners' contracts or powers of attorney | On parcels carrying risky buildings, on the request of any one owner all owners are called to a meeting; time and place go out on the new Ek-12 form through a notary or a fifteen-day announcement; the meeting is held with at least the absolute majority by share and the decision is signed and minuted |
| Reg. art. 15(4): what precedes the building permit | No express pre-condition to the permit application | Before the application, the offer must already have been served on the non-signing owners in the prescribed manner and the sale of their shares applied for; the Urban Transformation Directorate then writes to the permit authority stating whether the majority was reached and service completed |
| Reg. art. 15(8): subdivision | No rule on the effect of subdivision on the scope of the Law | On subdivision, only the parcel or parcels corresponding to the risky building stay within the scope, and the annotation is lifted from the others |
| Reg. art. 15/A: sale file and repeat auction | Meeting papers were not required; the repeat auction carried no electronic notification | The invitation documents and the minutes became compulsory annexes; the next auction is recorded on the new Ek-13 form, published for fifteen days and notified to every owner through e-Devlet |
Two of the five change an absent owner’s position rather than merely the paperwork. The first is Article 8/9. The previous text already provided that, after the risky-building annotation came off following demolition, work on the parcel continued under the Law. What is new is that the registry now enters a declaration on the title that the property is within the scope of Law No. 6306, so the position can be read from the register itself. The second is Article 15/A(12). A repeat auction must now be notified to every owner through the e-Devlet gateway, a safeguard the previous text did not contain, and one that helps only an owner who opens the account or authorises someone to open it.
Article 15(4) is the only point at which an outside body checks the file. Before a building permit is applied for on the strength of a majority decision, two things must already have happened: the decision and the offer must have been served on the non-signing owners in the manner set out in Article 15(2), and the sale of those owners’ shares under Article 15/A must have been applied for at the Urban Transformation Directorate (Kentsel Dönüşüm Müdürlüğü), or at the administration where powers have been delegated. The Directorate, or the administration, then carries out a preliminary examination of the sale file and sends the permit-issuing authority a letter stating whether the absolute majority was achieved and whether the notification steps were completed. The amendment also moved into Article 15(5) the rule previously in Article 15(4): where the owners decide to sell the plot left after demolition, the sale must first be offered to the Presidency, to bodies attached to or associated with the Ministry, to the administration or to TOKİ.
Two lighter provisions matter at the planning stage. Article 15(8) still requires the unanimous decision of every owner of an adjacent empty parcel before that parcel can be merged into the scheme, subject to Article 7(3) of the Planned Areas Zoning Regulation. And under Article 15(10), where a parcel’s development right is moved elsewhere by a transfer of development rights, work on the new parcel is carried out under Law No. 6306 only if all the owners are brought into co-ownership of that parcel and its other owners consent.
The Decision Threshold: an Absolute Majority by Share
Until late 2023 the threshold was at least two-thirds of shares. Law No. 7471 of 7 November 2023 replaced the words “at least two-thirds” with “absolute” in the first, second and fourteenth paragraphs of Article 6, so the operative test is now the absolute majority of co-owners by share. Article 6/1 also says the decision is taken “without regard to whether they are co-owners of the building”, which matters on parcels carrying several blocks.
That decision covers a wide list: merging parcels, subdividing, surrendering land to the municipality, registering, rebuilding, selling shares, and redeveloping on a flat-for-land or revenue-sharing basis. Under the version of Article 15(2) in force since 2024, and confirmed by the closing sentence of Article 15/A(1), none of this requires the building to have been demolished first. A share can therefore be put through the auction procedure while the flat is still standing.
One point is often misread. Article 15(1) preserves the right of any co-owner to bring an action under the Civil Code for the dissolution of the co-ownership once the building is down. The very next sentence limits it: bringing that action “does not prevent a decision being taken by the absolute majority of co-owners by share, or steps being taken under that decision”. Filing a partition suit does not freeze the transformation.
If You Do Not Sign: The Auction, Step by Step
The route from a majority decision to a new name on the title record is set out in Article 6/1 of the Law and Article 15/A of the Regulation.
| Stage | Rule | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Offer served | Electronic notification address if registered with the tapu; otherwise notary or 15-day muhtarlık posting (Ek-8 for risky buildings, Ek-10 for risky and reserve areas) | Reg. art. 15(2) |
| Deemed service | Electronic: end of the 5th day after arrival. Posting: last day of the 15-day announcement | Reg. art. 15(2) |
| Time to respond | 15 days to examine and accept the offer | Law art. 6/1; Reg. art. 15(2) |
| Annotation on the share | Registry notes that the share is subject to sale under Law No. 6306 and cannot be transferred | Reg. art. 15/A(2) |
| Floor price | Market value set by a Valuation Commission, taking account of the value determined by an SPK-authorised valuation firm and filed by the owners with the sale application; bids below it are not accepted | Reg. art. 15/A(1)(c), (3), (7) |
| First auction | Only co-owners who joined the majority decision may bid | Reg. art. 15/A(6) |
| Later auctions | Third parties may bid if they accept the majority decision in writing and lodge a cash deposit of 10% of the market value | Reg. art. 15/A(13) |
| Payment | Successful bidder pays into a term account and signs the agreement unconditionally within 7 days | Reg. art. 15/A(8) |
| Encumbrances | Mortgages, attachments and usufructs move onto the sale proceeds; the registry then clears them from the title | Law art. 6/1; Reg. art. 15/A(5) |
Two features of this procedure hit an absent owner hardest. The first is Article 15/A(4): the owner whose share is being sold is notified so that they may attend as an observer, but the paragraph states that failure to serve them, or their non-attendance, “does not affect the validity of the sale, and the sale carried out in their absence is valid”. The second is the price. The floor is a market value determined by a commission constituted within the Directorate or the administration, which takes account of, but is not bound by, the value that the owners have had determined by a valuation firm authorised by the Capital Markets Board and filed with the sale application. A non-signing owner who wants to test that figure needs an independent valuation of their own.
If a share is sold to a third party outside the group of agreeing co-owners before the statutory sale takes place, Article 6/1 makes registration conditional on the buyer notifying an electronic notification address to the land registry, a small provision that tells you how the legislature expects communication in these files to work.
Demolition, Costs and Expropriation
Once a building is determined to be risky, Article 3/1 gives owners or their legal representatives fifteen days to object, and objections are decided by a technical panel of seven: four university academics in the relevant discipline and three officials. The determination is served in a way that rarely reaches an overseas owner directly: under Article 3/2 the record is posted on the building, notified to owners through e-Devlet and announced for fifteen days at the muhtarlık, and the determination is deemed served on the last day of that announcement.
For demolition, Article 5/3 allows owners a period of not more than ninety days; if they do not act, the administration notifies that it will demolish, and Article 5/4 provides that the costs of determination, evacuation and demolition carried out by the Presidency or the administration are collected from the owners in proportion to their shares under the Public Receivables Law No. 6183. Where the building has been demolished and no absolute-majority agreement is reached within thirty days of service on the owners of the resulting plot, Article 6/2 permits urgent expropriation. That paragraph deems such expropriations to be for the realisation of settlement projects under Article 3(2) of the Expropriation Law No. 2942, with the first instalment set at one-fifth of the amounts determined under that paragraph: a payment structure, not a lump sum.
On the credit side, Article 7/9 of Law No. 6306 exempts the transactions it lists from the notary fee, the title deed charge, municipal fees and charges, inheritance and transfer tax and stamp duty, and Article 7/10 provides that, where natural persons or private-law legal persons carry out the works, municipalities take no fees or charges for new construction area up to one and a half times the existing construction area. Article 16(11) of the Regulation already limited the title fee exemptions proportionately where a risky parcel is merged with empty parcels; the 4 February 2026 amendment extended that rule to a transfer of the parcel’s development right to another parcel, so the exemptions are enjoyed only in the ratio the risky parcel’s area bears to the area of the new parcel.
Where This Sits Beside the Rest of an Owner’s Position
Urban transformation is one of several regimes that can affect a foreign owner’s Turkish property at the same time, and they do not coordinate with each other. A buyer still working through acquisition should read this alongside the ordinary framework for buying property in Türkiye as a foreigner, because Article 35 of the Land Registry Law No. 2644 caps the total area acquired by foreign nationals at ten per cent of the privately owned area of the district and each foreign national’s holdings at thirty hectares nationwide, and has land registry transactions carried out against the military, security and strategic zone maps supplied to the registry. Those limits bite again on the transformation file itself, because a foreign co-owner who buys another owner’s share at a Law No. 6306 auction is making a fresh acquisition. An owner whose building never received its occupancy permit is in a doubly awkward position, since several routine transactions are already blocked without one before the transformation file even opens.
The developer relationship is the other half of the picture. Article 6/14 of the Law gives owners a self-help route where the contractor stalls: if, after unanimity or an absolute-majority decision, work has not started within a year for reasons attributable to the contractor, or has been suspended and no site activity at a level capable of finishing the project has continued for at least six months, the absolute majority of owners by share may decide to terminate the contracts. The Presidency then verifies the position, gives the contractor thirty days’ notice, and on expiry the construction contracts are deemed terminated without further notice and without anyone’s consent. A related protection sits in Article 6/10: where the owners have transferred the property to the contractor under a promise to sell or a flat-for-land contract, no attachment or interim measure may be applied to it for the contractor’s debts to third parties until floor easements are registered in the owners’ names. The paragraph carves out claims for materials and labour arising from that same construction work, and the next sentence restores attachment altogether if floor easements are not registered within six months of the start of the works. Where the dispute is about quality rather than delay, the ordinary limitation framework for construction defects and warranty periods governs, and a buyer of a unit in the new building may have a separate route through the consumer courts, which is a different forum with different rules from those that apply when suing a developer in the Turkish consumer courts.
Two everyday problems tend to arrive with a transformation file. Vacated flats attract occupiers, and recovering possession and a use-and-occupation payment are two separate actions with two separate bases. And the building management continues to run during the process, so an owner should follow how maintenance fees and provisional budgets are being set while their unit is empty. Both belong on the same file as the transformation itself; work of this kind is handled as part of a real estate law instruction rather than as isolated correspondence, and the owner-side position inside a Law No. 6306 process (the offer, the majority decision and the share sale) is set out on our urban transformation and risky buildings page.
Reading the Register Rather Than the Post
The practical lesson of the 4 February 2026 amendment is that the Turkish urban transformation regime communicates through the land register and the e-Devlet gateway, and the amendment has made those channels denser rather than lighter. The meeting invitation, the offer, the auction date and the repeat auction date each have a prescribed form and a prescribed publication period, and every one of those periods runs whether or not the owner is in the country.
An owner abroad has three durable protections. Register an electronic notification address with the land registry directorate so that service reaches an address you actually read. Keep a representative in Türkiye under a notarised and, if signed abroad, apostilled power of attorney, so that a fifteen-day period can be used rather than merely observed. And have the title record checked on a schedule, because the annotations tell the story before any letter does: the risky-building annotation, the note that the parcel is within the scope of Law No. 6306, and the annotation that a share has been placed under the sale procedure.
This article states the position under Law No. 6306 and its Implementing Regulation as amended on 4 February 2026, current as at September 2026. Both instruments are amended frequently; confirm the text in force on the date of your transaction.
