How Istanbul's Crumbling Building Archive Became a Crisis: The Story Behind the Push to Fix Duplicate and Missing Property Records

Istanbul's property registration system has a problem that predates every smartphone app, every digital portal, and every e-government initiative the Turkish state has launched since the early 2000s. Thousands of buildings across the city carry duplicate image entries in the Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü — the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre — meaning the same structure appears twice in official records, sometimes under conflicting ownership data, sometimes with mismatched floor counts or plot boundaries. It is a bureaucratic knot that administrators have quietly managed for years. Now, with earthquake preparedness sitting at the top of every government agenda since the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş disaster, the knot has become impossible to ignore.

The urgency is not abstract. Istanbul sits on active fault lines, and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality has repeatedly cited the need for accurate, real-time building inventories as a prerequisite for effective disaster response. You cannot evacuate, reinforce, or condemn a building that the state cannot find in its own database — or finds twice, in two different formats, with two different addresses.

How the Duplicates Were Created

The problem has roots in the way Istanbul grew. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the city absorbed village after village on its Asian and European peripheries. Neighbourhoods like Ümraniye, Bağcılar, and Sultanbeyli were incorporated into the metropolitan boundary at different stages, often carrying local cadastral records that had never been harmonised with the central Tapu system. When digitisation drives began in earnest after 2005, technicians scanning paper ledgers from district offices in places like Fatih and Beşiktaş sometimes created new digital entries for buildings that already had partial records entered through a separate municipal pathway. The result was duplication — two image files, two polygon geometries on the cadastral map, one physical building.

The Kadıköy and Üsküdar districts on the Asian side offer particularly well-documented examples of the problem, according to urban planning researchers who have studied Istanbul's land registry modernisation. Older residential streets around Moda and Bağlarbaşı contain buildings where the scanned permit drawing and the separately digitised ownership certificate were filed as distinct records rather than linked entries. In some cases, the coordinates on the two records differ by several metres — enough to create genuine legal ambiguity about plot boundaries.

A broader national audit commissioned by the Land Registry Directorate and referenced in its 2024 annual activity report identified more than 430,000 cadastral parcels across Turkey requiring correction due to duplication, boundary error, or missing imagery. Istanbul accounts for a disproportionate share of that figure, given the city's size and the complexity of its administrative history. Correcting a single urban parcel, according to the same document, takes an average of 11 working days when contested by owners — longer when the duplicate record is tied to an active mortgage or inheritance dispute.

What Comes Next for Property Owners

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Department of Urban Transformation and Housing has been running an outreach programme since March 2026, directing residents in high-risk districts — particularly those flagged under the 2012 Urban Transformation Law, known formally as Law No. 6306 — to cross-check their title deeds against the online Tapu portal before applying for any structural assessment or state-backed earthquake retrofit grant. The message is practical: if your property appears in two places on the system, or if the scanned building image does not match your current structure, the discrepancy must be resolved before any public funds can be allocated.

For residents in older apartment blocks along İstiklal Caddesi's backstreets in Beyoğlu, or in the densely packed rows of Zeytinburnu — a neighbourhood long identified as among the city's most seismically vulnerable — the administrative process can feel distant from the physical reality of cracked plaster and ageing foundations. But planners insist the paperwork is the prerequisite. Buildings that cannot be cleanly identified in the cadastral system will not qualify for the government's low-interest retrofit loans, which the Housing Development Administration of Turkey relaunched under revised terms in January 2026.

Residents with concerns about their records can file a correction request at any of the 39 district Tapu offices across Istanbul, or initiate the process digitally through the e-Devlet gateway. The correction process does not suspend ownership rights while a review is underway, but it can delay any property transaction — sale, mortgage, or inheritance transfer — until the discrepancy is formally resolved.