Private capital: over 2 billion in commercial property

The ultra-wealthy and family offices are playing an increasingly prominent role in the Italian property market. Offices, logistics, retail and hotels. They buy and sell trophy assets. They diversify and pass on wealth to younger generations. It is these players that asset management companies are increasingly encountering during fund exits.

JLL’s report Italy Private Wealth – Capital Markets Report provides a clear and detailed snapshot of this new trend. According to the report, those with investable assets worth millions (the so-called high net worth individuals) and family offices, invested approximately €2.1 billion in Italian commercial property in 2025, more than double the figure for the previous year (+102%), accounting for 17 per cent of total transaction volumes. The first quarter of 2026 also confirms this positive trend, with over €400 million invested and a market share that has already reached 12 per cent in just a few months. In 2025 alone, around one in four property transactions in Italia involved millionaires and family offices as buyers or sellers, a share higher than the 20 per cent average recorded between 2020 and 2025 and confirmed again in the first three months of this year. Even more significant is the fact that, since 2023, the number of purchase transactions has grown at an average annual rate of 46 per cent, compared with the 15 per cent recorded for sales transactions, highlighting the gradual shift of private investors from sellers to net buyers. Admittedly, the acquisition of Via Montenapoleone 8 by Al Mirqab (the holding company owned by the Qatari sheikh, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani) from Kering has set the stage.

However, as Alberico Radice, CEO of JLL Italia, explains: “Within the space of a few years, millionaires and family offices have gone from being occasional players to a structural component of the capital invested in Italian commercial property. The fact that property purchases have grown at a much faster rate than sales means that property has found its way into the portfolios of high-net-worth individuals, serving as a means of diversification and protection – acting as an external ‘safe’ that is more resilient to economic cycles and international tensions.”

What is driving this trend? The flat tax is a secondary factor.
“Especially since the Covid pandemic,” Radice emphasised, “we have seen a gradual shift among many institutional investors – once typical buyers of property – towards other forms of investment, such as bonds, which offer yields that are more attractive and involve lower costs than property. These investors have been partly replaced by a greater presence of family offices, which, at the same time, have reorganised themselves and begun to diversify, adopting a counter-cyclical approach to industry trends, starting with private equity and an investment strategy focused on manufacturing.”

All this within a system – the Italian one – which, as the CEO of JLL Italia went on to say, “offers a supply of property assets at prices that are, on average, more affordable than in other European ‘markets’ such as London, Paris or Northern Europe, and opportunities for diversification, ranging from prime office space in Milan and Rome to hotels, logistics and high-street retail’.