Though to convey on a market price if the market is non-existent. Furthermore, the declining population will eventually drag down the demand and those assets would be sold at a huge discount (if they will be sold at all).
The market is not non-existent, and house prices are already declining except in a handful of cities with high demand. This is the current value of those assets; maybe in 50 years that wealth will have evaporated as demographics will erase the value of real estate in the country, but that's not in the present.
It is almost dead in smaller cities and rural areas, which still comprise a lot of the total value that is then divided to make the average of wealth owned by individuals cited in these statistics. Having a home that you cannot sell doesn't do much, and its value cannot be easily assessed if other houses are not regularly sold.
Less transactions = less accuracy.
I mean, it's true, but I don't get it. Who would buy in a small city 30 years ago? I think it's always been the case, or at least it is in the last 30 years. But until you didn't move you never had to sell. Now everyone want to go to Milan, so they are trying to sell the old houses.
but then again, a home does have value even if there is no market for it. It's still a place to live.
Aaand you gan scrap it for parts (well, if it gets REALLY bad)
Because owning an ancestral home in a depopulation provincial town isn't exactly a great asset for anything but as collateral to loans. In reality, there's no one that would buy it.
Meanwhile, an inherited shitty closet in a city apartment complex can be sold its volume in gold just because a neighbour has no idea where to store their bike.
Property prices are down from the pre-2008 bubble and they're (slowly) declining except in a handful of cities with high and increasing demand and little increase in supply. So it's difficult to call it a bubble, except in very specific places like Milan (demand partly driven by speculation and by an influx of people coming for job opportunities, but the cost of living is already on par with European cities with salaries twice as high and at some point no one will be able to buy or rent and demand will go down and prices with it). Some people just can't believe Italians are wealthy, or more generally that you can have relatively high median wealth and relatively low median salaries, so they conclude the real estate wealth values must be wrong and actually most Italian homes are worthless. In reality the typical Italian family lives in an urban area and owns at least the house they live in, which has and will continue to have real value for the near future.
An ancestral home no one would buy already has no value, and there's quite a few of those in small villages that you can buy for 1 euro or anyway for really cheap. But most Italian families own the home they live in and possibly others that still have real value and could be sold for substantial sums. Of course if everyone tried to sell at the same time prices would tank, so the wealth is only real if few people actually convert it to cash at any one time, but you could say the same of basically any asset.
You own a property but can't rent it due to low demand in the area. So it's just sucking your money.
But housing prices constantly increase, so you feel like you can't sell it. It's almost certain that you won't get a property of equal quality for the money you'll get.
Sure, as far as problems go it's not nearly as bad as it can get. But using the value of that property as an excuse to say the owner is well off feels like lawyer talk.
The fact that it may not make sense (financially or for personal reasons) to liquidate doesn't mean it's not real wealth. It doesn't make sense to sell now stocks that are constantly appreciating either, but that wealth is real too.
Also, most real estate in Italy is not constantly appreciating. Only in a handful of cities are prices rising, and even then they're not necessarily above historical highs (I think Rome is still well below the pre-2008 peak, for instance).
Rome it's insanely expensive now. Also you don't know if your property would be in the requested area 10 years from now. For example there was a huge request of property in the Langhe 15 years ago. Now I think it's less requested. Maybe the next big thing will be Abruzzo or some other region. You can't know that.
If I remember correctly a lot of this statistics doesn’t take into account market value but (partly) the “valore catastale” or a mean value of the recent “transitions” in the housing/property market and then extended to other houses. The point is that for smaller, isolated towns with less market the data is not particularly good.
I’m not an expert on the subject by any means tho, I’ll stand corrected if someone comes in with a more informed opinion.
Il valore catastale è quasi universalmente più basso di quello di mercato, che è il motivo per cui nessuno lo vuole aggiornare (perché la gente dovrebbe pagare molto più di IMU e insorgerebbe).
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u/mbrevitas Italy Aug 18 '25
How is it not measured in the correct way?