Due to saturation in some of the big Turkish cities and rapidly increasing land prices, many developers and institutional investors are forced to look beyond the biggest cities and explore secondary cities, like Mersin, Samsun, Kocaeli and Diyarbakir. Mersin for example, is a sizable city with a busy port on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey and an industrialised and commercially active city. It has already attracted a number of retail investment projects and houses five shopping centres, with the capacity to absorb further centres. Its retail profile is very similar to that of Athens, and its spending per m2 .
