Housing Report 2024, households more optimistic about access to credit

What the 17th Rapporto sull'Abitare 2024 (Housing Report 2024) portrays is an Italy of families increasingly struggling to buy homes. The drop in purchases and sales and the rise in rents in the cities is nothing new, but what is presented by Nomisma's analysis, conducted with the support of Crif, is a sentiment of potential buyers increasingly oriented towards renting. The disposable income for 3 out of 5 families is inadequate or barely sufficient to meet their needs, and it is difficult to think about buying a home (especially for one-person households and larger families). In general, Italians' confidence in the general situation is less positive than in 2023. In particular, it is the country's growth prospects, the economic and social fallout of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and the loss of credibility of the parties that influence a negative outlook.

According to the survey, the proportion of rented households that consider this as the only possible solution in the face of a lack of resources to access buying and selling has risen from 56% in 2023 to 59.3% in 2024. At the same time, the presence of another orientation, different from the one that considers renting a temporary solution or forced due to lack of resources, is confirmed: these are those who consider renting a choice motivated by family and work needs, and represent one in four of the rented households.

"For a growing number of Italians," notes Luca Dondi, executive director of Nomisma, "the purchase of a home risks proving to be a difficult dream to realise because, although awareness of the need to improve their living comfort has increased in recent years, families are having to come to terms with their financial capacity. In fact, the decline in interest in buying seems to concern above all the more financially and income-strapped component of households. In this context, for many people, renting becomes the only viable option, while waiting for the conditions of access to credit to allow them to reintroduce the ownership ambition that has now been forcibly shelved'.

Despite everything, however, the economic situation, which sees, if not an end, at least a stabilisation of inflationary levels, is leading households towards renewed confidence in accessing credit. In fact, the survey shows more favourable judgements on personal job security and the willingness of banks to grant mortgages than last year. So much so that there are 980,000 households with a profile of sustainability with respect to perceived income that in the next 12 months express a desire to purchase a home, an increase compared to 2023, while those interested in renting are 580,000.

Not only that: the survey also recorded signs of improvement regarding the perception that households have of their economic and income situation. The percentage of households intending to buy a house by resorting to a mortgage is in fact decreasing, from 77.9% in 2023 to 75.6% in 2024. On the whole, operators' perceptions confirm a progressive loosening of the offer criteria on household financing adopted by banks during 2024 in relation to the purchase of homes, as well as less difficulty on the part of households in paying their mortgage instalments (households who declared they had problems with payments were 4.3%, compared to 6% in 2023 and 7.5% in 2022.