The Turkish Word for Owner Became a Verb

In Turkish, "sahibinden" means "from the owner" - the two words a buyer once scanned newspaper classifieds for, hoping to skip the middleman and deal directly with whoever actually held the keys. In February 2000, a small team at Istanbul's Aksoy Group took that phrase, put it on the internet, and loaded it with 2,700 ads. The bet was simple: if the whole country wanted to buy and sell straight from the owner, give them one address to do it.

Twenty-five years later, the phrase is doing something most brands never manage. It has quietly turned into a verb. People in Turkey do not say they are searching for a used car; they say they will "look on sahibinden." That shift - from a website you visit to a thing you do - is the clearest measure of how completely one marketplace has folded itself into everyday life.

The founder, Taner Aksoy, saw the opening a year before launch. In 1999 the plan was to carry Turkish classifieds onto the internet with something the newspaper page could never offer: photos on every listing and a search box that could find a two-bedroom flat in a specific neighbourhood in seconds. The site opened in February 2000. By 2009 it had regional offices in Ankara, Izmir and Antalya, and was picking up national awards for best classified ads and best e-trade. The growth was steady rather than sudden - which, for a marketplace, is exactly the point.

01 / What it isOne site standing in for a shelf of services

In much of the world, buying a home, a car, and a used phone means visiting three different companies. sahibinden.com collapses that into one platform. It runs the country's largest classifieds and shopping marketplace, spanning ten main categories: real estate, vehicles, spare parts and accessories, second-hand and new goods, industrial and heavy equipment, services, private tutors, jobs, in-home help, and pets and livestock.

The practical effect is that a single account lets someone list an apartment for rent in the morning, sell an old sofa by lunch, hire a tutor for their kids, and browse commercial vans by evening. That breadth is unusual. Elsewhere, the same ground is covered by separate specialists - a Zillow for homes, an AutoTrader for cars, a Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace for the rest. In Turkey, one yellow logo covers all of it.

02 / Who uses itTwo very different crowds, one front page

The audience splits neatly in two, and the product is built to serve both at once. On one side are private individuals - the person selling a used phone, the family listing their car, the tenant hunting for a flat. On the other are professionals: real-estate agencies, car dealers, and businesses who treat the platform as a storefront and pay for the tools to run one.

The scale is national. As of April 2025 the company reported roughly 62.8 million monthly unique users and about 560 million monthly visits, generating 17.4 billion page views a month. In a country of about 85 million people, those are numbers that describe a public utility more than a website.

03 / The problem it solvesTrust between strangers

Every marketplace lives or dies on one question: can two strangers exchange money and goods without one of them getting burned? Classifieds inherited a reputation for risk - the cash-in-an-envelope deal that goes wrong. sahibinden.com's answer was to build trust into the transaction itself.

Its secure-payment tools, marketed as Güvenli e-Ticaret and S-Param Güvende, work like escrow: the buyer's money is held until the seller ships and the buyer confirms the item arrived as described. Only then is the payment released. It is a small mechanism with a large effect, turning a leap of faith into a structured exchange - and giving the platform a reason to sit in the middle of deals it used to only introduce.

04 / How it makes moneyFree to look, paid to be seen

The business model is the classic classifieds engine, refined. Browsing and searching are free, which keeps the buyer side enormous. Money comes from the sell side: fees to post listings, charges to promote or feature them higher in results, advertising packages, and premium tools for professional dealers who need bulk listing management and analytics. Secure-transaction services add another fee layer on top.

One dataset puts annual revenue near $124 million, with broader estimates in the $100-200 million range. What the model buys is durability. Because buyers come for free and sellers pay to reach them, the platform's value compounds with every new listing - more supply pulls in more demand, which justifies more supply. Economists call it a network effect. Turkish sellers just call it the place everyone already is.

Figures are approximate and drawn from public company disclosures and press reports.

05 / What sets it apartThe advantage of being first, and staying

sahibinden.com's real moat is not a feature - it is liquidity. When a marketplace has the most buyers, sellers go there; when it has the most sellers, buyers follow. That loop, running for a quarter century, is very hard for a challenger to break, even a free global one like Facebook Marketplace. You cannot out-feature a habit.

Two other things separate it. First, independence: while much of the world's classifieds industry consolidated under private-equity owners, sahibinden.com has stayed under the Aksoy Group and, in 2025, publicly reaffirmed that it intends to keep it that way. Second, an in-house R&D center that has kept a 2000-era product current - the mobile apps, the escrow layer, and more recently voice search built into the app, letting people run listings hands-free.

06 / Where it sits in the marketThe default, not the disruptor

In the map of Turkish internet businesses, sahibinden.com occupies the position everyone else is measured against. Vertical rivals attack slices of it - specialists in real estate or autos, and general e-commerce players like Trendyol and Hepsiburada that sell new goods at scale. But none combine the same breadth of categories with the same depth of second-hand supply. The platform has even leaned into that second-hand identity as a sustainability story, publishing annual reports since 2021 on how reused goods reduce waste, and becoming the first e-commerce company in Turkey to earn Green Office certification.

Run by a team of around 1,600 out of the Aksoy offices in Istanbul's Ataşehir district, it is a business that has chosen consistency over reinvention. The logo has barely changed. The proposition - buy and sell, from the owner - has not changed at all. In a technology sector obsessed with pivots, sahibinden.com's strategy has been to find the front page of a country's economy and simply refuse to leave it.

07 / The detailWhat sells fastest, and why it matters

If you want to understand the platform in one fact, here it is: the fastest-selling category is mobile phones, often gone within a week of listing. That single data point captures the whole machine - constant supply, constant demand, and enough trust between strangers that a valuable, easily-faked item changes hands in days. A marketplace that can move a used phone quickly and safely can, it turns out, move almost anything.

There is a wider lesson in it too. The engineering that makes a used phone sell in a week - fast search, ranked results, fraud checks, an escrow layer, apps that work on a patchy mobile connection - is the same engineering that keeps 17.4 billion page views a month from falling over. The expertise is not glamorous. It is the unshowy discipline of keeping a very large, very busy public square open every hour of every day, in a market the company knows better than anyone because it has been serving it since the year 2000.