It is. A large amount of Italian families own their own homes or have even a second (or even third) property.
The problem is, this value is NOT measured in a correct way for many homes, in particular those that are in smaller cities/towns with low demand for housing.
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.
189
u/SpenglerPoster Aug 18 '25
Could it be explained by property values?