Italy’s luxury residential market may have another two to three years of price growth ahead, according to Lionard Luxury Real Estate. The more revealing part of the brokerage’s view is not the forecast. It is that international buyers are becoming less loyal to famous addresses.
Forte dei Marmi, the lakes, Cortina and the established Tuscan markets still attract immediate attention. Yet buyers prepared to spend at the top of the market are increasingly willing to leave those names behind when another property offers the right park, space, privacy or architectural quality.
The search is moving from postcode first to property first. That could redraw Italy’s luxury map more profoundly than another year of higher asking prices.
A brokerage forecast, not a national price index
Lionard founder and chief executive Dimitri Corti believes the market has not reached its full valuation potential and may continue expanding for two or three years. He points to international demand, Italy’s relative pricing against other global luxury destinations and the arrival of affluent new residents.
The attribution is essential. This is Lionard’s assessment of the segment in which it operates, informed by its clients and portfolio. It is not an official forecast for every Italian home, and it should not be read as a promise that any villa bought in 2026 will be worth more in 2029.
“Luxury property” is not one market. A renovated apartment in Brera, a waterfront villa on Lake Como, a masseria in Puglia and a castle requiring several million euros of work respond to different buyers, supply constraints and resale conditions.
The forecast is most credible where the asset is genuinely scarce: exceptional position, protected view, substantial land, architectural authorship, difficult-to-reproduce waterfront or a restoration quality that would cost more to recreate than to acquire. It becomes much weaker when luxury means only size, a new kitchen and an ambitious asking price.
Thirty thousand enquiries reveal a changing client mix
Lionard says it receives about 30,000 new purchase enquiries a year. Americans are now the largest nationality among its clients, followed among the principal groups by French, German, Swiss and British buyers.
Those are proprietary lead figures rather than completed sales. One person may enquire more than once, many enquiries do not become viewings and a viewing is not a transaction. The data is still useful because it shows who is entering the top of the funnel and what they ask to see.
The shift towards American buyers is consistent with a broader international reassessment of Italy. The country combines cultural density, European access, food, design and a stock of historic property that few markets can reproduce. Prices have risen sharply in the best-known areas, yet prime Italian real estate can still appear comparatively attainable beside London, Paris, New York or the most constrained parts of the French Riviera.
Comparative value should not be confused with cheapness. A buyer attracted only by a lower price per square metre may be ignoring restoration, staffing, gardens, security, access and the cost of operating an old building across four seasons.
The tax cohort is smaller than the headlines suggest
Lionard estimates that roughly 2,000 to 4,000 of its 30,000 annual enquiries may be associated with affluent new residents using Italy’s flat-tax regime. That is a minority of the enquiry pool, though one with significantly greater spending power on average.
The distinction matters because international coverage often presents the tax regime as the entire explanation for luxury demand. Lionard’s own figures suggest it is a powerful accelerant rather than the whole engine.
The regime has also just become a great deal more expensive. The 2026 budget law raised the annual substitute tax for new residents from 200,000 to 300,000 euro on 1 January, and the charge for each family member from 25,000 to 50,000. Anyone who moved their residence by 31 December 2025 keeps the old rate.
Hold that next to the forecast. Lionard is describing flat-tax buyers as a demand driver in the same year the entry ticket rose by half. Whether the higher figure thins that cohort or simply filters it towards larger fortunes is the thing to watch across the next two seasons, and nobody has the data yet.
Suitability still depends on residence, income and family circumstances. Independent Italian tax and legal advice comes before the offer, never after it.
Property selection should also survive the possibility that the tax advantage changes again. A house bought only because of a fiscal window is a financial instrument wearing a tiled roof. The best purchases still need to work as homes, assets or both.
From famous destination to exceptional property
For decades, international buying in Italy began with a short list of names. Lake Como. Chianti. Forte dei Marmi. Porto Cervo. Cortina. The location provided reassurance before the buyer understood the individual asset.
Digital search has reversed part of that process. A client can now begin with requirements, ten hectares, privacy, a helipad possibility, direct water access, a chapel, a historic tower, proximity to an international airport, and discover a municipality previously absent from the brief.
Lionard argues that exceptional property characteristics increasingly outweigh the fame of the location. This does not mean the postcode no longer matters. It means a lesser-known area can compete when the estate offers something the established market cannot: more land, fewer neighbours, a better approach, greater architectural integrity or the possibility of creating a complete private compound.
Corti names no new region. He describes a method: the client starts from the property and the requirements, and the geography widens from there. The places that method surfaces are ours to name rather than his. Central Italy is the obvious one, where the gap between an internationally recognised wine zone and the valley beside it can be large in price and small in beauty. The same pattern shows up around the secondary lakes, in inland Liguria, in parts of the Veneto and at the quieter edges of famous coastal markets.
“Undiscovered” is dangerous marketing language. Local communities know these places perfectly well. What has changed is the foreign buyer’s ability to find them.
The second home is becoming a primary life
Lionard also sees more international clients buying for permanent or long-term relocation rather than occasional holidays.
That changes the brief immediately. A summer villa can be forgiven for being forty minutes from a hospital, difficult in winter or dependent on a seasonal restaurant economy. A primary residence needs schools, healthcare, airport access, reliable internet, year-round staff, security and a town that continues functioning after October.
It also changes the house. Holiday architecture can privilege terraces, guest rooms and spectacle. Permanent living demands storage, working space, acoustic privacy, sensible heating and rooms that remain comfortable on a wet Tuesday in February.
The strongest relocation purchases may therefore be less cinematic than the best second homes. They trade a perfect arrival photograph for a property that supports ordinary life exceptionally well.
Broader data supports demand, not the two-to-three-year promise
Independent forecasting points somewhere quieter.
Nomisma’s 2026 observatory puts nominal residential price growth at 0.9 per cent this year, 0.5 per cent in 2027 and 0.4 per cent in 2028. Apply inflation and all three are negative. Transactions are forecast flat, around 780,000 a year. That is a consolidation.
The two views need not collide. Nomisma is measuring every Italian home; Corti is describing the top of a market where supply is fixed and the buyer is foreign. Knight Frank’s 2026 wealth reporting puts international buyers at around 35 per cent of Italian prime and frames the country as tax-led, while recording that global prime growth slowed to 3.2 per cent in 2025 from 3.6 per cent the year before.
Together they support one conclusion. Foreign interest in Italian prime is substantial and increasingly visible. They do not support the idea that every region and property type rises in parallel for three more years, and the broad market is forecast to do the opposite.
For a buyer, the useful question is not whether “Italy” will go up. It is whether the exact asset remains rare after the market cools.
Privacy and land come with invisible liabilities
The qualities buyers now prioritise, large parks, privacy, historic fabric and distance from neighbours, also create the greatest due-diligence burden.
Land boundaries, rights of way, agricultural leases, water, protected trees, landscape restrictions, pool permissions, roof changes and historic alterations can all matter. A beautifully restored villa may contain work completed under rules or records that need checking. A castle may be legally one thing, operationally another.
Technical, planning, legal and title reviews should be independent of the selling agent. So should the budget for deferred maintenance. Stone walls, formal gardens, private roads and old drainage do not respond to the romance that sold the house.
Operational due diligence is equally important. Who can manage the property year-round? Where will staff live? Can the chef shop locally in winter? How long does a specialist contractor take to arrive? Privacy loses value quickly when every repair requires access through the only gate.
The map is widening rather than flattening
The famous markets will remain famous because their supply is constrained and everything around them is mature. Costa Smeralda, for example, combines architecture, marinas, private aviation, seasonal staff and an international social network that cannot be recreated by finding a cheaper stretch of coastline.
What is changing is the assumption that every trophy home must sit inside one of those. Some buyers now want the opposite: enough distance to build their own.
That gives lesser-known territories a chance, but only through exceptional stock. A mediocre villa in an unknown place does not become interesting because the market is “discovering” the area. The property has to supply the reason the name does not.
Lionard’s forecast may prove optimistic, cautious or exactly right. Its more durable observation is already visible: the international buyer is arriving with a list of conditions and allowing the house to reveal the map.
Luxury.it perspective
Read the forecast as what it is: a hedged opinion from a firm paid on transaction value, and one the national numbers do not support.
The observation underneath it is the durable part, and it holds whether prices rise or not. Buyers who once started with Lake Como or Forte dei Marmi now start with ten hectares, a gate nobody can see from the road and forty minutes to an airport, then ask where that exists. A market organised around names is slower to find those houses than a market organised around requirements.
So the thing to watch is not the next postcode turned into a status symbol. It is the rare Italian property strong enough to make a postcode unnecessary.
Related guides
Explore the sector through Villas and Real Estate, and see how a mature market prices itself in our Italian villa guide.
