The buying and selling of homes suffers an ulterior contraction, whereas the prices display a substantial hold. This is the scene of the residential real-estate market in Florence, which emerges from the trimestral note recently published by the Revenue Services’ Real-Estate Market Observatory (OMI).
After the first trimester’s -4%, as compared to the same period from 2012, the number of normalized transactions related to real-estate units (a figure that takes into proportional account the prices of the properties being transferred) dropped by 11.3% in the Tuscan regional capital, 2ith 891 properties exchanging hands. The same figure for the entire Florentine province is of 9.8% to 1,021 properties sold (-15.7% compared to the first trimester). Considering Italy’s top eight cities by population, the contraction in Florence was smaller only than that in Genoa, whereas the other metropolises registered drops in sale of less than 10% (with the exception of Naples and Bologna, with growth), whereas the statistics pertaining to the entire provinces see Rome, Milan, and Genoa drop by more than 13%. A -9.3% drop was registered at the national level.
The detailed trend analysis of the residential markets pertaining to geographic macro areas, the Observatory comments, highlights the negative deceleration rates in all Italian areas: the regions in the North, however, have better rates than the Center and the South, just like the regional capitals seem to be closing the gap towards a trend inversion more quickly than the smaller municipalities. As far as pices, the estimates calculated by the OMI on the entire first trimester of 2013 indicate that nearly 34 billion Euros were spent towards a home purchase, excluding the transactional fees and taxes, with a 13% decrease compared to the same semester in 2012: the national mean value of the homes sold was of 167,000 Euros. In the Central regions, the highest mean value, at 222,000 Euros. Among the twelve most inhabited cities, Florence is the one with the highest mean values, at nearly 310,000 per home, and with prices of 3.216 Euros per sq m (a little less than in Rome and Bologna). Compared to the first semester of 2012, the prices show a decrease of 0.6%, demonstrating a substantial hold.
Broadening the gaze to the entire real-estate sector, the Observatory points out that the flection of the national real estate market persisted during the second trimester, even if with a lower rate of decrease. The real-estate units that were bought and sold decreased to 242,817, marking a drop of -7.7% compared to the second trimester of 2012. The reduction of sales pertained to all the subsectors: for the residential, it was of -9.3%, for the adjacent structures (mostly related to the residential sector) of -7.5%. A similar scenario for the non-residential: the tertiary sector records a drop in excess of -10%, the real-estate structures zoned for production registered a -6.5%, and the commercial subsector registered a -2.7%.