Turkey's Real Estate Funds: How GYFs Became a 120 Billion TL Asset Class

Turkey's Gayrimenkul Yatırım Fonları, real estate investment funds known as GYFs, have quietly grown into one of the most consequential asset classes in the country's capital markets. As of January 2026, 87 GYFs are registered with the SPK, collectively holding property assets with declared values exceeding 120 billion TL. That figure has roughly tripled in five years, a pace of growth that reflects both the inflationary repricing of Turkish real estate and genuine new capital formation. The range of underlying assets is striking in its variety: shopping centres in Istanbul and Ankara, logistics warehouses along the Gebze-Kocaeli corridor, residential towers in Izmir, mixed-use developments on the Aegean coast, and land banks positioned for future development across multiple provinces. What was once a niche vehicle used primarily by construction companies to warehouse unsold inventory has become, by any reasonable measure, the institutional backbone of Turkish real estate investment.

The structural sophistication of the GYF market has deepened alongside its growth. A typical large GYF is managed by a licensed portfolio management company (the "founder" in SPK terminology), with underlying property assets held through one or more special purpose vehicles, usually Turkish limited liability companies, which in turn may sit beneath holding structures that include both domestic and international entities. This layering is not exotic by global standards. In the United States, REITs routinely hold assets through chains of Delaware LLCs, operating partnerships, and taxable REIT subsidiaries. In the UK, institutional property funds use Jersey or Luxembourg vehicles as standard. The Dutch BV, a common intermediate entity in cross-border real estate structures worldwide, appears in several Turkish GYF chains for the same reasons it appears in Blackstone and Brookfield portfolios: tax treaty access, established commercial law, and administrative efficiency. Fonkuşu examined the ownership structures of the five largest GYFs by declared asset value. In every case, the architecture was multi-layered but recognisably institutional, following patterns that would be familiar to any real estate fund lawyer in London or New York.

The tax framework underpinning GYFs, including exemptions from corporate tax on rental income and capital gains within the fund structure, has been central to the sector's growth and appears to be functioning as designed. The policy objective was to channel capital away from fragmented, informal property ownership and toward institutional vehicles with professional management, audited accounts, and regulatory oversight. On that measure, the results are difficult to argue with: 120 billion TL in assets sitting inside regulated, SPK-supervised structures rather than in opaque individual holdings or unregistered partnerships. Disclosure practices, it should be noted, are still evolving. The SPK's public database lists portfolio management companies but does not yet require full beneficial ownership transparency of the kind mandated by the EU's Anti-Money Laundering Directives or the UK's PSC register. Disclosure requirements are widely expected to tighten as the sector matures, a trajectory consistent with what happened in the US REIT market over its first two decades of growth. The direction of travel, in short, is toward greater transparency, and the sector's increasing scale gives the SPK both the incentive and the leverage to accelerate that process. For now, the more important story is the one the numbers tell: Turkey has built a functioning, growing, increasingly sophisticated institutional market for real estate capital, and the GYF is its central instrument.