A new study conducted by the Gate-away.com intelligence department has revealed where and what foreign buyers are willing to invest on in Italy by comparing the data collected from the inquiries received so far in 2009.
The report has highlighted that the interest of foreign buyers is still mainly for the most popular regions of Italy but that also less known regions are becoming ever more popular, attracting interest of overseas investors.
Tuscany is still the most wanted region with the 19.52% of the inquiries, followed by Le Marche (12.85%) and Liguria (11.12%). In a range between 6.35% and 6.95% there are Apulia, Abruzzo, Calabria, Lombardy and Piedmont. Sardinia and Umbria rank 9 and 10 with 5.76% and 4.49% respectively.
Despite Tuscany keeps leading the way we can see that the gap between Tuscany and the other region has been narrowing in the last few years, meaning that the interest in properties is spreading throughout the Italian territory. This is due mainly to low cost airlines that opened up to new areas of Italy, thus new property market, but it is also due to an increasing number of estate agents in those areas who started to market their properties to overseas buyers making the choice of properties in those regions wider, whereas before when a potential buyer wanted to invest in an unknown area of Italy found it very hard to spot any property availability and had to divert the interest in another, more popular, area.
The average asking price of the properties inquired is EUR288,344 with the peak of EUR516,013 of Liguria, where many Russian buyers have sent enquiries, and EUR120,509 of Calabria. Tuscany received enquiries for properties with an average home value of EUR371,252, against an average price of all properties listed in this region of EUR690,964.
The majority of the inquiries were for houses instead of apartments, the 34% of the properties had a garden and a 12% had a swimming pool.
If we have a look at who is looking where we see that while Tuscany, as said above, is the favourite region by the majority of buyer’s nationalities, Liguria is the region that has enchanted the most Russian who like also the beautiful Lake Como, and Swedish buyers, who like also Calabria.
UK property investors prefer Le Marche, French are quite fond of Puglia along with Sardinia, Dutch tend to like Lombardy and Le Marche and US buyers, apart from Tuscany, choose Calabria and Abruzzo which, along with Le Marche, is also liked by German home investors.
As for the budget the richest are, without surprise, the Russians with an average price of properties inquired of EUR869,484 followed by Dutch buyers with an average of EUR410,973. The “poorest” seem to be the Germans (EUR232,784) followed by the Belgians and the Swedish (respectively EUR249,212 and EUR265,056). UK buyers beat US with an average of EUR298,744 against EUR269,475.