Condominium and Site Management Law

Those parts belong to the owners, not to the manager or to some notional building entity. Article 16 vests them in the owners in proportion to their land shares (arsa payı) under the rules of co-ownership, and makes the measure of the right to use places such as the shared garage, terrace and laundry proportional to the land share unless the owners have agreed otherwise. Land share, not floor area, is the unit of account for much of building life. Where a property is still held on kat irtifakı rather than kat mülkiyeti, Article 17/3 applies the condominium regime to management once the building is actually finished and two thirds of the units are in use, so an unconverted development is not a governance vacuum; the conversion itself belongs to the pre-purchase file examined in our guide to buying property in Türkiye as a foreigner.

Two lines repay a second reading. Article 19/2 catches far more than owners expect: enclosing a balcony, changing the exterior colour, fixing a condenser to a façade are all works in common areas, and four fifths in writing is demanding. And Article 42/1 opens with a prohibition rather than a permission: owners may not make a change in the common areas on their own account at all.

Voting is regulated so as to limit large holdings. Article 31 gives each owner one vote regardless of land share, and an owner of several units one vote per unit, but never more than one third of all votes; an owner directly concerned by a resolution may join the discussion and may not vote. Proxies are capped at five per cent of the votes per person, although in properties of forty units or fewer one person may act as proxy for no more than two owners. Article 29 requires at least fifteen days’ notice of an extraordinary meeting, stating its reason, and at least seven days between a first and a second meeting.

Article 35 lists the duties, and reading it closes off most arguments about authority: implementing the assembly’s resolutions; the measures required for the building to be used, protected, maintained and repaired according to its purpose; insurance; collecting advances until the operating budget is approved; receiving notifications addressed to the building as a whole; preventing the loss of a right or the expiry of a period; proceedings and enforcement against owners in default, and registration of the statutory mortgage; a bank account in the manager’s own name showing that capacity; calling the assembly; and lift maintenance and inspections. Where a building meets the Article 34 conditions and no manager has been appointed, the final paragraph makes the owners jointly responsible for having those works done. Article 38 sets the standard of liability: the manager answers to the owners exactly as an agent.

Formality helps a challenger. Article 32/4 requires resolutions to be written into a book whose pages are numbered consecutively and each sealed by a notary, signed by all owners present, with dissenters stating their reason as they sign; Article 32/5 makes an earlier entry on the same matter govern a later dispute as a rule. Article 38/2 answers the question of who is sued: actions to annul resolutions of the owners’ assembly, the island representatives’ board or the site representatives’ board may be brought against the manager representing the owners, who must then notify all owners, and where the resolution is annulled the litigation costs are met from common expenses. Where an action to annul the resolution by which a board was elected is already pending, a later challenge to that board’s own decision may depend on its outcome, and Article 165 of Civil Procedure Law No. 6100 allows the court to stay a case whose judgment depends wholly or partly on another case until that case is concluded. An owner therefore has to decide whether the flaw lies in the decision or in the mandate of the body that took it.

Article 67 makes shared social and infrastructure facilities common places of the units to which they are allocated regardless of the parcel they physically sit on; this is the provision that lets a pool on one parcel be a common area of flats on another. Article 72 allocates cost on the same logic and bars an owner from avoiding the site charge by renouncing use or by pointing out that a facility sits on another parcel; it also makes resolutions of block assemblies, site representatives and the temporary management board documents falling within Article 68/1 of Enforcement and Bankruptcy Law No. 2004, which lets a creditor ask the enforcement court to remove an objection definitively within six months of its service. Developer control is time-limited: under Article 73 a temporary management may run at most until one year after the development is completed, and ends in any event ten years after the first building permit within it was obtained. Article 74 applies the rest of the Act to collective developments directly or by analogy, and Article 29 requires their boards to meet at least once every two years, a cycle in which a single missed notification can cover a long run of decisions.

Short-term tourist letting adds a further layer. Article 3(3) of Law No. 7464 makes a unanimous decision of all owners of the building a documentary condition of the permit, applied in a residential site only to the building where the unit is, subject to Article 3(4); Article 3(4) provides that in buildings made up of more than three independent units a permit may be issued in the name of the same lessor for at most twenty-five per cent of them, and provides that once that lessor holds permits for more than five units in the same building, the application must also include a workplace opening and operating licence and, where the building is in a residential site, a unanimous decision of all owners of the site in addition to the decision required by Article 3(3); Article 3(10) exempts high-qualified residences whose management plan permits short-term letting and which offer reception, security and daily cleaning facilities; and Article 1(3) keeps lettings of more than one hundred days at a time outside the Act altogether. The permit architecture and the penalties are set out in our note on short-term tourist rental permits and the unanimity requirement.

Occupiers sit inside the system. Article 18/2 applies the owners’ obligations to tenants, holders of a right of habitation and anyone else benefiting from a unit on a continuing basis and makes them jointly and severally liable with the owner, subject to Article 22, under which a tenant’s liability for charges is limited to the rent payable. Building staff have their own regime: under Additional Article 2, caretakers, heating operators, gardeners, watchmen and externally appointed managers whose contracts have ended must vacate accommodation allocated for the job within fifteen days, failing which the local civil administration orders the police to clear it within a week, and an application to an administrative or judicial body does not suspend that decision. For an owner outside Türkiye the recurring failure is not the substance of any of this but the plumbing: notices sent to an address nobody reads, a proxy cap that limits how many owners one representative may act for, and one-month periods that expire before the correspondence is translated; the wider set of duties that keep running in an owner’s absence is collected on our property compliance for non-resident owners page.