Worth £5.3 billion in the UK and €1.7 billion in Spain, build-to-rent in Italy remains a work in progress: a promising pipeline with figures still too immature to read with confidence.
A model already established elsewhere
In the UK, Europe's reference market for build-to-rent, the sector reached £5.3 billion in investment in 2025, with total stock approaching 300,000 units. In Spain, volumes ran around €1.7 billion over the same year. These are the numbers of a mature model: institutional developers building entire residential assets explicitly to hold and manage as long-term rentals, not to sell unit by unit.
Italy's 2025 volumes remained limited. A methodological caveat matters here: there's currently no aggregate estimate of the Italian market genuinely comparable to those of the UK or Spain. Figures circulating in sector reports tend to bundle build-to-rent in the strict sense together with hybrid formats, serviced apartments, rental-oriented branded residences, that follow different investment logics. A reliable Italian BTR figure will likely need another year of data, once today's under-construction projects reach operational stage.
Why the caution is warranted
This isn't a polite way of avoiding a number. It's a deliberate methodological choice: Italy's segment is still at the stage where the announced pipeline far exceeds actual operating stock, and available data doesn't always clearly separate capital genuinely committed from capital merely allocated to a fund or vehicle. In an immature market, announced and realised can diverge sharply, and treating them as equivalent risks producing optimistic readings the facts don't support.
What can be said with more confidence is the direction of change. Institutional entrants into residential leasing bring a genuinely new competitive dynamic to a market that has historically been fragmented and managed almost entirely by individual landlords.
A shifting tenant base
The natural target for these products is the most mobile segment of housing demand: relocating professionals, under-40s seeking a stable first rental in a major city. These groups now compare traditional private offerings, often opaque in response times and selection criteria, with digitally managed products offering transparent contracts and more predictable service. It's a comparison the Italian rental market has rarely had to face at scale.
A favourable backdrop, on paper
Some background indicators suggest fertile ground. Average gross yield on Italian income-producing residential property rose to 9.5% in Q1 2026, up from 9.1% at the end of 2025: a level that, once tax burden and real management costs are stripped out, still ranks among the more attractive in Europe for rental investors. Add an increasingly strict regulatory environment around short-term rentals, which in recent years has begun pushing stock currently allocated to tourist letting back toward long-term rental, particularly in the historic centres of major art cities.
None of this alone guarantees Italian build-to-rent will follow the UK or Spanish trajectory. Together, these factors sketch a context where structural demand for a professionally managed housing product already exists. What's still missing is supply at scale, and with it the data to measure it rigorously.
What to watch
The real test for Italian BTR will come in the second half of the decade, as a meaningful number of under-construction projects reach commercialisation. Only then will a genuinely comparable data series exist, and only then will it be possible to say whether Italy follows the accelerated growth trajectory seen elsewhere, or whether the structural fragmentation of Italian housing ownership keeps slowing its spread.
For now, the most honest answer isn't a figure. It's an open question.