Selling a house, the ranking of cities where negotiations are fastest

Among Italy's large cities Milan is the one in which properties sell fastest, on average in less than three months, while Bari is in last place with over five months. The data come from an analysis conducted by Immobiliare.it Insights, which examined, for the first half of the year, the average time to sell of real estate in the major centres of our peninsula. In the capital of Lombardy, houses were sold on average in 2.7 months between January and June 2024, a figure identical to that of the first half of 2023, when the city of Milan was still firmly at the top of the ranking. In second place, paired up, Bologna and Florence, with average sales times of 3.3 months and a slight increase, amounting to +1% and +0.6% respectively, compared to the first half of 2023. Just a little further back comes Rome , with 3.4 months on average and up by 1.8% in comparison with the January-June 2023 period.

On the other hand, the time to sell averaged more than four months in Turin (4.1), stable compared to last year, and in the two large Sicilian centres Catania and Palermo, which are practically side by side in the ranking, at 4.4 and 4.5 months respectively. If, however, Catania saw a contraction of 8% in one year, Palermo saw a time dilation of around 7% over the same period. Also at the same level is Genova, with 4.5 months on average, a figure almost unchanged over the past year. On the other hand, the average time to sell a property in Venice is close to five months (4.9), but times have dropped by 7.7% in the last year. The pearl of the lagoon nevertheless maintains a significant gap over Bari, which, as mentioned, is in last place among large cities with 5.5 average months and up 13.1% compared to the first half of 2023. A comparison with 2019 shows that in all the cities analysed, sales are faster today than pre-Covid. In all cases, sales times decreased by more than 20%, with Verona leading this trend (-43.9%), followed closely by Milan (-43.3%). The least consistent decreases took place in Bari (-25.1%) and, above all, in Venice, which recorded -22.3%.