Italian residential real estate market: Revenue Agency report

1. Introduction
2. Residential: purchasing and selling
   1. Purchase with mortgage
   2. Buying as first home
   3. New or existing homes?
   4. Size of dwellings
   5. Locations
3. Residential real estate rental
4. Link to the Revenue Agency portal

Introduction

The Italian Revenue Agency (Agenzia delle Entrate) has published the usual statistics on the trend of the Italian real estate market in the second quarter of 2024.

The interesting results are elaborated by cross-referencing the data obtained from the transcription notes with those of the cadastre and registry archives.

The analysis is dedicated, separately, to the market for residential real estates, non-residential real estates and lands.

The focus of this article is on the residential context, with regard to both real estates purchases and sales and rental.

Residential: purchasing and selling

For sales in the residential sector, there was an increase of 1.2% compared to the same last year period.

The numerical volume is around 186 thousand of real estate units bought and sold.

The increase is more than 2,000 compared to the same period in 2023.

Purchase with mortgage

With reference to the whole Italian territory, 40% of the total number of purchasers have taken out a mortgage loan; this figure is on the rise, probably also related to the fall in interest rates on mortgages.

Datas that rise above this percentage in the cities of Milan, Florence and Bologna, with a 10-percentage-point increase in the capital, Rome.

Buying as first home

Purchases made by individuals who have opted for the first home relief are about 71% with a considerable increase of about 7 percentage points compared to the same period in 2023.

Rome holds the record for first home purchases with about 83%.

New or existing homes?

Purchases of newly built properties fell by almost 15% compared to the second quarter of 2023; nationwide 6.4% increase compared to the first quarter of 2024, with a doubling in the Milan. metropolis (13%).

For existing dwellings, on the other hand, the year-on-year increase is 2.5%.

Size of dwellings

An interesting trend concerns the overall surface area of dwellings, where the small size (less than 50 sqm) and the large size (greater than 115 sqm) stand out, each seeing an increase of around 2%.

Locations

While it is true that nationwide the upward trend in sales is driven by the northern and central areas, the situation in large cities (by population) is more varied:

• increases of over 3% for Rome and Genoa;
• more than 7 percentage points decrease for Florence and Milan.

Residential real estate rental

New registered rental contracts decreased by 2.7 percentage points compared to the same period in 2023.

The decrease concerns almost homogeneously both the municipalities with high housing tension as well as those with not with high housing tension.

On the other hand, rents increased by 2.6 percentage points.

As far as market segments, with reference to the number of rented dwellings:

• long-term contracts decrease by 5.5 %;
• a minimal increase (0.1%) for transitional contracts, for which there is a significant increase in the annual rent (+6.7%);
• a decrease of 1% also for contracts with an agreed rent;
• a 4.5% increase for subsidised leases for students in full; rising to 25.7% for leases in portions.

Link to the Revenue Agency portal

Below is the link to the page of the Italian Revenue Agency (Real Estate Market Observatory) dedicated to quarterly statistics: Schede – Statistiche trimestrali – Statistiche trimestrali – Agenzia delle Entrate (agenziaentrate.gov.it).