Turkish real estate agency Antalya Homes has sold nine properties to date using bitcoin core, mostly to foreign buyers. The houses cost a minimum of €30,000 each (~$33,900) said the agency, which also accepts bitcoin cash, ethereum, stellar, ripple, litecoin and tether.
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‘Crypto Purchases of Property Are Reliable and Faster’
Antalya Homes chairman Bayram Tekce said cryptocurrency purchases of real estate come with multiple advantages. “Payment with cryptocurrency enables a more reliable and faster transaction performance such as money transfer between bank accounts without any exchange loss,” Tekce was quoted in the online daily Business Standard as saying on Mar. 5.
Turkey has continued to see a boom in both cryptocurrency use and in its property sector, driven by strong demand from foreign nationals. In 2018, investors from abroad bought 40,000 properties in Turkey, an increase of more than 80 percent from a year earlier. Foreign buyers target homes in Istanbul, the Antalya region and other coastal and scenic areas.
Tekce, whose company started taking cryptocurrencies last year, said Antalya Homes has created a “Pay with Bitcoin” button on its website to assist those who intend to buy property this way. The company chairman did not clarify how payment in BTC was made.
“It is very profitable to purchase real estate for those who want to utilize their cryptocurrency investments in the real estate sector,” he said. “By making investments particularly in countries like Turkey, where housing is becoming increasingly valuable, investors can shift their investment to a less risky and safer area, and multiply their savings.”
Growing Use
Bitcoin’s acceptance as a means of payment has grown steadily over the years. The cryptocurrency is already used in many industries including automotive, travel and informatics and has now penetrated the Turkish real estate sector, even though agents in other countries were already selling property using crypto.
In 2017, Southeby’s International Realty sold one of its first single-family homes in Austin, Texas using BTC. The Austin home was sold when Bitcoin prices were $3,429 in September of that year.
Canter Companies, a full-service investment firm specializing in real estate and asset management projects, also listed two multi-million dollar homes for sale in BTC in 2017. The homes were collectively valued at around $20 million, while another realtor put up for sale a 27-acre piece of land in Silicon Valley, payable in BTC, ETH or XRP.
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