A practice built around the file, not the brochure

Most investors approaching Türkiye deal with three separate parties: an agent who sells them a property, a lawyer who files an application, and nobody at all once the passport arrives. Each holds one piece and none holds the outcome. Problems surface late, usually at the point where they are most expensive to fix.

SARDAG was built the other way round. We hold the whole chain — legal counsel, property sourcing and viewings, title due diligence, transfer coordination, the citizenship file itself, and property management afterwards. That structure exists for a practical reason: the defects that sink an application are found by reading title records and funds histories, not by looking at photographs.

Arda Şardağ

Founding attorney and managing partner. He has personally run investor files across the full range of Turkish routes — real estate, bank deposit, investment fund, government bond and private pension — including files complicated by prior immigration restrictions, multi-jurisdiction identity documentation, and source-of-funds histories spanning several countries.

He writes and speaks on Turkish investment migration as a practitioner rather than a commentator, and has been cited as a source on Turkish tax and citizenship developments by the industry press. The firm contributes to international investment migration publications and attends the sector's main conferences.

The team

How we work

Secondary market, not developer stock

We work central Istanbul resale property rather than off-plan projects. The reasoning is straightforward: an off-plan unit carries delivery risk, its valuation is set by the party selling it, and at the end of a three-year holding period you are competing to exit against every other unit in the same building. A resale property in a completed, tenanted building has none of those problems.

We will tell you not to buy

Where the objective is the passport and the asset is incidental, the deposit route is frequently the better answer — the principal returns in full and there is no exit to time. We say so, and we say it before an engagement rather than after. A client who understood the trade-off they were making is a client who stays.

Referral relationships

We act as Turkish counsel for a number of international advisory practices whose clients are considering Türkiye. Those firms send us files because they need the Turkish law to be right, not because we are the loudest marketing operation in the market. We do not name them here — their client relationships are theirs, not ours to advertise.