Vacant homes and overregulated markets: The Italian real estate market between Housing Crisis and Planning Failure

Abstract

Despite the absence of formal public regulation, the Italian real estate market exhibits all the substantive indicators of a market of public interest: constitutional relevance under Article 47(2) of the Italian Constitution, systemic externalities affecting financial stability, and deep structural information asymmetries. Available evidence requires a distinction between a real estate market crisis - which is not occurring, given that prices and transactions are rising - and a housing crisis, understood as the structural inaccessibility of housing for an increasing share of the population. Against this background, the accumulation of regulations on short-term tourist rentals and the exercise of regional legislative autonomy in the field of tourism constitute a form of ultraregulation that increases burdens on private owners without addressing the structural causes of housing vacancy, which are rooted in landlords’ distrust of the effectiveness of possession recovery procedures in cases of tenant default. The article then analyses the Spanish IBI surcharge model introduced by Ley 12/2023 as a paradigm of upstream regulation designed to modify owners’ incentive structures and redirect vacant housing stock toward its residential function, assessing its compatibility with the principles of the Italian tax system