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Bologna: fewer mortgages and more tourist rentals

29 November, Il Resto del Carlino

On one side, the difficulty to get a mortgage, on the other hand, the increase of tourist rentals thanks to short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb. In the middle, there is the Bologna property market, burdened by the consequences of recession and by the many tourists visiting the city. According to the data of the Real Estate Survey by Nomisma, the residential real estate market will end 2018 worse than it started. The analysis shows “a standstill of the residential market in the second semester in comparison with the outlook reported in the first part of the year”.

Specifically, Nomisma registered “a strong shift of the demand from purchases to rentals, with this latter returned to the values of four years ago. In the second part of 2018, the demand for rents increased by 61% surpassing by far the demand for houses to buy.

According to the analysis, there are “structural and economic factors”. The former is “the difficulties of low-income households to access a mortgage”, while the latter is “the high demand for rents” fueled by tourists “that is blocking the property market”.

After the positive results of the first semester, sellers are back granting discounts on the average offered price. The negotiations manage only partially to reduce prices by 0.2% for new houses and by 0.3% for dated houses. Similarly, the gap between requested price and the actual price has reduced up to 7.3% for new houses and to 10.5% for old ones.

But this wasn’t enough. Short-term rentals have grown “mirroring an increasingly reduced offer for properties for rent, pushing rents to increase by 0.4% in the first semester and by 2.0% in the second semester”. This trend of temporary and short-term rentals is common to all the national territory.

In Italy, despite the good results of property transactions in 2018, the uncertainties around the new budget law are worrying. According to the research centre, the year will close with a 5.6% growth of transactions (although with a 0.9% decrease in prices) for a total of approximately 570 thousand transactions. However, all the attention is on the situation of the country:” the slowdown of the economy, together with the uncertainty due to the confrontations between the Government and the European Commission concerning the 2019 budget law, had an impact on the real estate sector inevitably”.

Nomisma stresses how “without a substantial correction of the economic policy, the financial tensions will risk reducing the fuel that has been driven the recovery of real estate up to now”.

Source: Il Resto del Carlino

Translator: Cristina Ambrosi