Six districts lost their tourism licence in July, and the municipality published the decision as a list of street names with no map attached. We geocoded all four hundred and twelve addresses and put them against our own price history for the same streets.
The result is not the collapse that was predicted in the local press. Asking prices in the affected districts fell 4.2% over four weeks, but the volume of new listings rose by a third — owners moving from short lets to long lets rather than selling.
−4.2%asking prices in the six districts, four weeks after the decision
A two-hundred-and-ten square metre townhouse in the old town, listed for eleven months by two agencies at €1 380 000. Every document was in order except the one that mattered: no permit issued since 1904 records a fourth floor.
Our surveyor measured it on a Tuesday and the listing matched her figure to the metre — which is what bothered her, because listings and lasers almost never agree that closely. They agreed because whoever wrote the listing had measured the building, including the floor nobody had ever consented.
€312 000the value a buyer would have paid for and could not have used
We sent the same complete application to eleven lenders in four countries: same income, same deposit, same property, same paperwork, submitted within the same week. Nothing varied except who was reading it.
The spread between the best and worst quote was wider than the entire movement in the market rate over the preceding year. Underwriting policy, not the base rate, is what determines what a borrower pays — and it is the one variable nobody shops.
0.42%average spread on identical paperwork, eleven lenders
Medians moved less than two per cent in every city we cover, which is the least interesting number in the report. The interesting one is the gap between what sellers asked and what they signed, which widened with every step up the price ladder.
Below three hundred thousand the discount averaged nine tenths of a per cent. Above three million it was six point four. The full report breaks that spread down street by street, with the raw figures published alongside the prose.
−1.8%median gap between asking and signed, index-wide
Up to thirty per cent of the works covered in Palermo and Porto, on buildings that meet a list of conditions most owners never read to the end. We have taken fourteen applications through to payment in the last two years.
What qualifies is narrower than the headline suggests and the paperwork is slower than the municipality claims — a median of seven months from application to first payment. It is still the best money available to anyone restoring in the old centres.
€2.4 Mpaid out to owners on the register last year
The deed said a hundred and four square metres. The laser said ninety-six. Neither number was a lie — they were measured under different rules, forty years apart, and only one of them is what a buyer can use.
This is the commonest discrepancy on the register and the one owners argue about hardest. We publish our method, we remeasure on request, and we do not list an area we have not stood inside.
1 in 5properties where our measurement differs from the deed
TF
Regulation desk
