Buying a yacht in Istanbul

Where the money is, and where the boats are

Turkey’s yachting economy is geographically divided in a way that is unusual and entirely logical. The wealth, the corporate headquarters, the banks and a good proportion of the owners are in Istanbul. The building yards, the marinas, the crew and the cruising are eight hundred kilometres south.

Brokerage follows the owners. A great deal of Turkish yacht business is transacted through Istanbul offices for vessels lying in Bodrum, Göcek, Marmaris or Antalya. If you are buying in Turkey, the negotiation may well happen here even though you will never see the boat in this city.

For a foreign buyer this is straightforwardly useful. The professional layer in Istanbul — maritime lawyers, accountants, corporate service firms and banks — is the deepest in the country, and the structuring work is better done here than in a coastal town.

Can you actually keep a boat here?

You can, and a substantial local fleet does, but it is worth being clear about what that means.

The city has good marina capacity — on the European side at Ataköy and further west, on the Asian side at Kalamış and Pendik. The facilities are modern and the berths are obtainable, which is not something that can be said of every city on this list.

The limitation is what you do with her. The usable local season is roughly four months, the Bosphorus is a working waterway rather than a cruising ground, and the nearest genuine cruising — the Princes’ Islands aside — is a long passage through the Dardanelles into the Aegean. A boat kept in Istanbul is a boat for evenings and for the Marmara.

That suits a certain owner very well: someone who lives here, entertains on the water, and wants the boat twenty minutes from the office. It suits nobody who bought a yacht in order to cruise.

Flag, VAT and the non-EU position

Turkey sits outside the European Union and outside the EU VAT area, and this is the single structural fact a foreign buyer must work through before anything else.

A yacht bought and kept under Turkish flag sits in the Turkish tax system, with Turkish VAT on the purchase. For a vessel that will stay in Turkish waters that is generally the simplest and cheapest arrangement, and the low running costs make it attractive.

For an owner who wants a Greek, Italian or wider Mediterranean season, the position is quite different. Taking a non-EU-VAT-paid vessel into European Union waters for anything beyond temporary admission triggers importation and a VAT charge on her value, and that figure will dominate every other number in the decision.

Turkey also operates free zones used for construction, refit and export, which matter if you are commissioning a new build here for use elsewhere. That is a structure to set up at the outset with proper advice, not to adapt later.

Buying through Istanbul, keeping her south

This is what most owners actually do and it is worth setting out as a sequence rather than leaving it implied.

1. Structure and advice in Istanbul. Maritime lawyer, accountant, ownership vehicle and the EU-or-not decision. The professional depth here is real and it is worth using.
2. Search on the southern coast. Bodrum for Turkish-built and gulets, Göcek and Marmaris for owner-user boats, Antalya for the eastern Mediterranean fleet. This is where the inventory is.
3. Survey where the yards are. Bodrum has the wooden-hull expertise and the general yard capacity. Have the lift and the survey done there, and price the remedial list before you renegotiate.
4. Base her where you will use her. For most owners that is Göcek, Marmaris or Bodrum rather than Istanbul, and the eight-month southern season is a large part of the reason.

The exception is the Istanbul-resident owner who genuinely wants the boat in the city for entertaining. For them the calculus reverses, and a smaller, well-appointed day boat on a Bosphorus berth is a thoroughly sensible thing to own.

Resale and liquidity

The Turkish market is substantial by regional standards and largely domestic. A yacht sold here sells mostly to a Turkish buyer, and the pool for foreign purchasers is limited by the non-EU VAT position more than by anything to do with the boat.

That argues, as it does in Göcek and Bodrum, for buying internationally recognised tonnage rather than something purely local. A well-known production yacht can be sold to a buyer anywhere who is prepared to deal with the import question; a Turkish-specific vessel is a domestic asset.

Against that, the domestic market is genuinely active and Istanbul is where the buyers with capacity are. For a seller with a good boat and reasonable patience, this is a functioning market rather than a thin one — which is more than can be said for several of the destinations on this list.

Finance, which is why this is the hub

The reason brokerage clusters in Istanbul rather than on the coast is not proximity to boats. It is proximity to banks.

Turkish yacht finance, marine insurance, corporate structuring and the legal work around vessel ownership are all concentrated here, alongside the shipping and commercial maritime sector that has been in this city for a very long time. For a transaction of any size, that professional depth is the substantive advantage.

For a foreign buyer the practical value is in the advisory layer rather than the lending. Maritime lawyers here handle cross-border yacht work routinely, understand the free-zone and export structures used by the building yards, and can give a clear answer on the EU-versus-Turkish question that governs everything else. That is worth a day of somebody’s time before you make an offer on a boat in Bodrum.

New build, contracted from here

A good deal of the contracting for Turkish new builds happens through Istanbul even where the yard is in Antalya or Bodrum. If you are commissioning rather than buying used, the contract, the stage payments, the independent verification of milestones and the retention are the transaction — and this is where the people who draft them properly are.

Questions