EIRE: Real estate key to relaunch economy, Italian minister says

Real estate is one of the key sectors to re-launch the Italian economy, Italy’s infrastructure minister Maurizio Lupi said at the opening conference of the Expo Italia Real Estate trade fair in Milan this week.

‘Real estate has a strategic importance for our country and we need to ask ourselves why there are still so few international parties active in our country,’ Lupi said.

Italy’s residential transactional volumes have been declining for the fifth consecutive year in a row, he noted. In 2012, the sector posted the worst result since 1985, with a decline in sales of 150,000 housing units compared to the previous year.

The decline is largely linked to the tight financing market, where a total of €26 bn of new loans was generated in 2012, marking a fall of nearly 45% on 2011 levels.

‘The response to the crisis should be the simplification of procedures, the re-launch of housing policies and urban requalification, as well as specific initiatives to increase access to credit for both families and companies,’ he added.

The minister also called for the public sector to make better use of legislation which allows local state-owned entities to extract value from real estate by transferring assets to property funds.

‘The use of public real estate assets should be transferred through a competitive procedure to private parties on the basis of programmes which valorise the value of the asset itself,’ he concluded.