Housing sales of real estate developers in Turkey Murat Selim Selvi Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Tekirdag Namik Kemal University, Tekirda g, Turkey Aykut Pajo Department of Business Administration, Pınarhisar Vocational School, Kırklareli University, Kirklareli, Turkey, and Ceyda Çakir and Emre Demir Department of Business Administration, Institute of Social Sciences, Tekirdag Namik Kemal University, Tekirda g, Turkey Abstract Purpose – Because of competition, residential property developers use a variety of promotional tools to gain recognition and increase their market share and the demand for housing, and to manage their customer relations. This study aims to examine what real estate developers did to detect the need for types of housing, and pricing and promoting housing. It also sought clues about how they manage customer relations in residential sales. Design/methodology/approach – In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with real estate developers. This study has heuristic characteristics based on qualitative data. Document reviews, descriptive analysis and discourse analysis were carried out on the interview data and other sources. As purposeful sampling is generally used in qualitative studies; intensity sampling, homogeneous sampling, criterion sampling and snowball sampling were used together in this study. Findings – The study found that real estate developers were inadequate at advertising and promoting, allocated little budget for promotion and did not use technology sufficiently. The real estate developers gave discounts at rates that did not actually desire, had to create payment plans, and as a result, they lost customers because they could not manage customer relations well. Research limitations/implications – Interviews were conducted with 15 real estate developers who have been selling residential properties for more than 10years in Süleymanpasa and Çorlu districts of Tekirdag. Data obtained are mostly qualitative. Originality/value – This study aimed to determine real estate developers’ ability to implement a variety of promotional strategies and manage customer relations. Results and conclusions can offer significant clues about real estate developers with similar characteristics. Its conclusions of this study can be compared to similar studies of real estate developers in many regions of Turkey. Keywords Marketing, Real estate, Housing markets, Housing prices, Housing market analysis Paper type Research paper Although the real estate developers in the Süleymanpas a and Çorlu districts requested that their names not be disclosed, The authors would like to thank them for sharing their opinions, knowledge and experiences, for answering their questions sincerely during the interviews and for contributing so much to this study Housing sales of real estate developers Received 13 December 2019 Revised 14 February 2020 Accepted 18 February 2020 International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis © Emerald Publishing Limited 1753-8270 DOI 10.1108/IJHMA-12-2019-0123 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1753-8270.htm