Over the past five years, Italian residential real estate has fragmented into a thousand different declinations: student housing, co-living, senior living, build-to-rent. Seen through the eyes of the institutional investor, Living is now a clearly defined growth trajectory. Yet the distances between its different souls remain enormous.
The Italian residential market: Living as a strategic growth path
Over the past five years, the Italian real estate sector has seen a proliferation of living formats: student housing, co-living, senior living, serviced apartments, build-to-rent, affordable housing and flex living. It is now widely acknowledged that the residential segment has entered a phase of profound transformation, marked by a level of complexity often discussed at conferences and in industry reports.
When the market is observed through the eyes of the institutional investor, rather than through the lens of real estate communication and marketing, one unequivocal fact emerges: in Italy, Living is now a clearly mapped line of development, albeit with the caution owed to a business that is still emerging.
The international perspective
According to the leading international advisory firms, it is now one of the most attractive asset classes in Europe, with expectations of consolidation over the 2026-2028 period. JLL estimates Living investments in Italy at approximately EUR 1.2 billion in 2025, up 40% year on year; yet the segment still accounts for only around 7% of the national total, compared with a European average close to 24%. The gap with the rest of the continent — where Living reached almost EUR 56 billion and, according to Colliers, ranks as the second most traded asset class after offices — says more than any narrative about the growth space still available.
The reasons behind demand are rooted in several structural factors: population ageing, growing professional mobility, the difficulty of accessing home ownership and the transformation of household structures. All of these elements are generating a housing demand that is profoundly different from the past and is progressively shifting from ownership to rental.
A substantial difference remains, however, between Italy and Europe. While the main markets have created consolidated industrial supply chains, the Italian system still shows strong fragmentation, slow transformation and a significant shortage of institutional-grade product. Supply is largely made up of scattered properties held by private investors, with uneven management standards and limited operational standardisation. The result is an almost total absence of investable stock for institutional operators.
Build-to-Rent
PRS, in its Build-to-Rent (BTR) declination, is one of the most mature asset classes in the Anglo-Saxon, German and Northern European markets: buildings designed, developed and managed exclusively for short-, medium- and long-term rental. Value does not derive solely from the appreciation of the asset, but from the ability to generate stable, predictable income streams under professional management.
The situation of Italian BTR
In Italy, however, BTR remains more a conference topic than a real asset class. Unlike the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands or Spain, the domestic market still lacks a significant stock of properties developed according to industrial professional-rental models. The numbers confirm this: according to JLL, multifamily accounts for around 10% of Italian Living investments, compared with a European standard of approximately 67%; and where product does exist, prime yields remain compressed, at around 4.5% in Milan and 5% in Rome. Net of announcements and pipeline initiatives, truly operational and consolidated examples can be counted on one hand. As a mature and scalable real estate-financial product, BTR is still substantially non-existent.
One figure is particularly significant: from 2020 to today, only two initiatives can be considered concrete cases of BTR developed according to institutional criteria and now in their sixth year of management: Flat Tower in Milan and Maria Vittoria 18 in Turin.
Both promoted by Vittoria Assicurazioni within an exclusive industrial partnership with the Morning Capital group, they anticipated a market that did not yet exist and today represent some of the very few national benchmarks capable of providing real data on management, occupancy and performance. Further initiatives launched in 2024 and 2025 have not yet produced appreciable results.
Why BTR is not taking off
The reasons why BTR is struggling to take off have cultural roots as well as endogenous factors typical of transforming models. Culturally, Italy remains one of the European countries with the highest rate of home ownership, with a clear intergenerational divide in the approach to living: for Boomers and Generation X (those born up to the 1980s), renting is still perceived as a temporary solution rather than a long-term choice; for Millennials and Generation Z (those born up to the first decade of the 2000s), it is instead a real alternative to ownership, valued for its flexibility and lower capital lock-up.
On the endogenous side, the weight of urban planning and regulatory criticalities is significant in a system that struggles to keep pace with transformation: instability of territorial and supra-territorial rules, long authorisation timelines, and complex, winding administrative procedures.
To all this must be added a financial element: in order to attract institutional investors, BTR requires critical mass, management standardisation and significant scale — characteristics that the domestic market is still unable to express, while awaiting the effective move of major capital.
Student housing
Student housing, another soul of Living, has very different characteristics, thanks to systemic support from policy and capital markets. Here demand now appears consolidated and supported by structural dynamics: domestic and international public funding, and a significant shortage of beds compared with the population of off-site and international university students.
Student housing in numbers
The numbers explain the interest. According to Colliers’ PBSA Snapshot 2026, in 2025 investments in Purpose-Built Student Accommodation reached EUR 520 million (+63% year on year), for the first time representing more than half of the entire Living volume and attracting more than 90% foreign capital. On the demand side, against approximately two million students — of whom 1.7 million attend in person, with an international component growing by 14% — Italy offers only around 80,000 dedicated beds: less than 8% of off-site students find accommodation in specialised residences, compared with 23% in France and 14% in Germany.
PNRR and the Italian scenario
The public lever aims to close this gap: the PNRR has set a target of 60,000 new beds, and the recent Cassa Depositi e Prestiti call provides at least EUR 579 million. This is where the most delicate part of the game is being played. As is appropriate, here too it is necessary to distinguish between narrative and reality: developers and operators are still metabolising the functioning of public support, which does not finance construction but supplements rental revenues in the early years (approximately EUR 19,967 per bed), on condition that rents are at least 15% below market levels and that a share of beds is reserved for students entitled to financial aid.
In this scenario, operational management becomes the real decisive factor: occupancy, services, maintenance, process digitalisation and the quality of the living experience are increasingly decisive in value generation. This is where specialised operators are positioned, capable of integrating real estate management and hospitality management, with particular attention to university students, visiting professors and young professionals.
La Ringhiera Student Housing & co-living
La Ringhiera Srl Società Benefit, part of the Morning Capital group, currently counts more than 400 real estate units for a total offering of over 1,400 beds, structured around two souls: scattered single units across ten university cities under the Urban Campus brand, and entire buildings dedicated to hosting university students and visiting professors (PBSA). This profile places La Ringhiera among the leading players in the national market, on a par with the first Italian operator in the segment.
Senior Living
If Build-to-Rent is the still unfinished present of Italian Living, Senior Living is undoubtedly its future — although reflection remains open on the reference business model, the true success factor.
Italy is one of the longest-lived countries in the world and has one of the oldest populations in Europe: over-65s already approach 25% of the total and, according to Istat projections, will move towards 34% by 2050. Despite this, the market for housing services dedicated to self-sufficient older people remains largely unexplored and undersized. The services gap is clear: Gabetti’s research department reports 512 nursing-home beds per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the level of the Nordic countries and below the European average, while most regions do not reach 50 beds per thousand over-65s.
Senior living supply and demand
Potential demand is growing, but a sufficiently articulated and industrialised offer is still lacking, built on solutions that demonstrate the robustness of a clear underlying vision. Investors show strong interest; more difficult is finding on the market the multidisciplinary skills capable of integrating the real estate, healthcare, social and management dimensions. Within the Morning Capital group, there has long been discussion around the extent to which senior living, in its management mechanics, overlaps with BTR: the true transformation of Living, ultimately, does not concern the building itself, but the service that enables flexible and fungible use according to the user profile.
The era in which value was generated almost exclusively by asset ownership now appears to be over: new housing models require professional management, technology, community management, ancillary services and data analysis capabilities to support predictive decision-making.
The transformation of Living
Living is probably the most important structural transformation in European real estate over the last twenty years. This is the direction in which the most evolved operators in the market are moving. Among them, the Morning Capital group has developed a real estate service company model capable of overseeing the entire real estate value chain — from deal origination to asset management, from operational management to the development of specialised industrial businesses — leveraging the technological revolution to innovate organisation and processes.
