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An increase of 115.7% in six years, with the requested rents rising from 4.7 to 10.1 euros per square meter. This is the data relating to Catanzaro contained in the dossier published on 6 October by the Turin newspaper The Pressbased on the calculations of Immobiliare.it Insights. Applying that average value to a house of one hundred square meters, on paper, you arrive at just over a thousand euros per month.
But the number alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
«This is certainly a significant figure – observes Sandro Scoppa, president of Confedilizia Calabria and Catanzaro – but we need to understand what it measures. We are talking about prices requested in real estate advertisements, which do not automatically coincide with the fees actually agreed in the rental contracts. Even the reference to one thousand euros per month per one hundred square meters is the projection of an average value and not the rent ordinarily charged for each home in the city”. Catanzaro, moreover, does not express a uniform market. Area, quality of the property, furnishings, duration of the relationship, destination of the location and characteristics of the accommodation can produce very different values. Reducing everything to a single figure therefore risks providing a simpler image of a reality that is not simple.
This does not mean, however, minimizing the increase. If requests grow so markedly, the market is transmitting information. The fee is in fact a price and, like any price, arises from the meeting between supply and demand. If it increases it means that, at least in certain segments, demand meets an insufficient or in any case inadequate supply. The main issue remains precisely this: if there are few homes available compared to demand, prices rise. A wider offer, however, increases competition, multiplies the possibilities of choice and tends to contain fees.
Tourism and short-term rentals are often called into question in the rental debate. It is a reading which, according to the same president of the Calabria branch of the historical and representative association of real estate, risks oversimplifying the phenomenon. «Short-term rentals also respond to real demand and represent one of the possible ways of using the property. Tourism, then, is an economic resource that Catanzaro should develop. If tourist, temporary, university or professional demand grows, it means that the market is changing. There is little point in reacting by trying to establish from above which use of the property is preferable. It makes much more sense to create the conditions for an overall increase in supply.”
The point, therefore, is not to slow down one form of rental to favor another, but to make putting a property on the market more convenient and less risky. We need certain rules, effective release times, less burdensome taxation, simpler procedures and contractual instruments capable of adapting to the needs of the parties. If renting becomes too onerous, rigid or uncertain, the risk is that of obtaining the opposite result: fewer owners available to rent, fewer properties on the market and even greater pressure on rents.
Even on a local level, tools capable of making the market broader and more complex can be used. The new Territorial Agreement for agreed rent contracts, promoted by Confedilizia Catanzaro and filed on 1 July, is in this direction, which offers owners and tenants further contractual possibilities and allows, when the conditions are met, to access the benefits provided by the legislation.
At the same time, Confedilizia Catanzaro has expanded and digitalised its services. Through the association’s website it is now possible to access numerous services relating to rentals and related obligations online, while the new Confedilizia Catanzaro app allows you to reach information, assistance and dedicated services more quickly.
«Reducing time, costs and difficulties means concretely contributing to making it easier to put a property on the market – concludes president Scoppa -. And there is an elementary lesson of economic theory that should not be forgotten: price does not create scarcity, it signals it. Prices convey information about the relationship between supply and demand and indicate where a good is relatively scarce. The answer is not to compress the signal, but to remove the obstacles that prevent the supply from increasing.”