How Istanbul's Building Stock Became a City of Duplicate Images — and Why It Now Has to Fix That

Istanbul's land registry offices are sitting on a problem that predates smartphones, digital cameras, and in many cases, colour photography itself. Across the city's 39 districts, property files held by the Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü — Turkey's General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, known universally as TKGM — contain duplicate, mismatched, or outright missing building images attached to title deeds. The problem is not new. What is new is the pressure to do something about it.

The urgency sharpened dramatically after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes killed more than 50,000 people across southern Turkey and exposed, brutally, what happens when property records fail to reflect physical reality. Buildings that existed on paper did not exist on rubble-strewn streets. Buildings that stood had been quietly subdivided, extended, or rebuilt without ever updating their official image records. Istanbul, with its roughly 16 million residents and an estimated building stock of over one million structures, watched and took notes.

A System Built for a Slower City

The roots of the duplicate image problem run back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Istanbul's population roughly doubled in a single decade as workers flooded in from Anatolia. The city expanded fast — faster than its bureaucracy. Gecekondu settlements spread across hillsides in Gaziosmanpaşa, Bağcılar, and Ümraniye. Apartment blocks went up in Kadıköy and Şişli without the kind of systematic photographic documentation that would allow a future official to confirm, at a glance, which building a deed actually described.

When TKGM began digitising records in earnest through the TAKBIS electronic registry system — a process that accelerated through the 2000s — staff scanning paper files often grabbed whatever photograph was closest in a folder. Identical stock images of generic apartment facades ended up attached to dozens of separate deeds. In Fatih, the municipality's own urban transformation office identified at least three separate title deed files that shared a single photograph of a five-storey apartment block on Adnan Menderes Bulvarı — a building that had been partially demolished and rebuilt between the photo's original capture date and its digital upload.

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's urban transformation directorate, working alongside TKGM district offices in Beyoğlu and Üsküdar, began a systematic audit of high-risk buildings in 2024. The audit prioritised structures flagged under the government's urban transformation law — Law No. 6306, the so-called Riskli Yapılar framework — where accurate imagery is legally required before demolition orders can proceed and compensation can be calculated.

What Correction Actually Looks Like

Replacing a duplicate image in a title deed is not simply uploading a new photo. Under current TKGM procedure, the process requires a licensed surveyor to attend the property, generate a fresh site report, cross-reference it against the existing floor-area declaration (imar durumu), and submit a formal correction request through the e-Devlet portal. Processing times at the Üsküdar TKGM branch were running at six to eight weeks as of early 2026, according to fee schedules and procedural guidance published on the directorate's official website. The survey fee alone can reach 4,500 Turkish lira for a standard apartment, a figure that has roughly doubled since 2022 in line with broader construction-sector inflation.

The issue has particular bite for residents in buildings slated for earthquake-proofing under Istanbul's rolling urban transformation programme. Without a correctly documented title deed image, applications for the government's low-interest transformation loans — administered through Emlak Katılım Bank — stall at the first administrative hurdle. Homeowners in older stock neighbourhoods like Zeytinburnu and Avcılar, where riskli yapı designations are concentrated, have found themselves waiting months simply because a clerk in 1998 grabbed the wrong photograph.

For anyone navigating the system now, the practical path runs through the e-Devlet property services portal, the relevant district TKGM branch, and — if a building is already under an urban transformation file — the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Kentsel Dönüşüm Müdürlüğü on Kemeraltı Caddesi in Karaköy. Submitting a formal image correction request before a riskli yapı determination is issued is significantly faster than trying to fix records mid-process. That window, property lawyers in the city have been noting publicly, is narrowing as the municipality accelerates its pre-earthquake audit schedule ahead of the 2028 targets set under the national disaster risk reduction plan.