In JLL's 2026 Global Real Estate Transparency Index Italy improves by 5 basis points and remains among transparent markets, but outside the thirteen that attract over 80% of direct investment. Transaction data, administrative predictability and credit: where the risk premium is formed.
In mid-September JLL published the fourteenth edition of its Global Real Estate Transparency Index, which scores 88 countries and 146 city markets on 260 factors. The Italian results, released on 8 October, give a score of 2.08, where 1 is best: Transparent tier, nineteenth place, up 5 basis points on 2024 against a global average of 4.
Progress is real but slow. In 2001 Italy was rated semi-transparent. It has since moved up a tier and now sits just below the leading group.
Why the tier matters
There are thirteen highly transparent markets, led by the United Kingdom, France, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands, and including Germany, Belgium, Japan and Singapore. According to JLL they hold 56% of the world's income-producing property and over 80% of direct investment. In the past two years their transaction volumes rose 64%, twenty points more than the rest of the sample.
The mechanism is simple. An investor who cannot verify rents, prices and rules adds a margin to the return required, and that margin ends up in the price. For the same cash flows, a building in a less readable market is worth less.
The Italian paradox
Yet Italy attracts foreign capital: it ranks sixth for cross-border direct investment, up from eleventh in 2021. Foreign investors tend to price opacity into required returns and rely on local structures. In June Raul Ravara of Hines pointed to investment through funds run by Italian asset managers as a competitive advantage for the country. Those managers act as translators, filling a gap in public information with private expertise, and the service has a cost.
Transaction data
The Revenue Agency's property market observatory publishes transaction volumes and value ranges by homogeneous zone every six months. Prices from individual deeds, available monthly in the United Kingdom, reach the Italian public only in aggregate form. In the commercial segment consultancies fill the gap with their own methods, with visible results on 8 October: CBRE and Dils had both estimated about 7 billion euros of investment in the first half of 2026, yet growth over the same period of 2025 was 2% for one and 28% for the other.
The other front, rules, is harder to measure and possibly costlier.
Written rules and applied rules
On paper Italian rules are detailed. In practice the value of a site depends on how a planning office reads a provision, on how long a joint review takes, on how floor area is calculated and on the standards monetisation table in force when the permit is issued. The Milan planning affair, with an interpretative law under parliamentary discussion for almost two years, showed how much uncertainty can weigh even on permits already granted. Foreign investors find this risk hard to estimate, and a risk that cannot be estimated is discounted in full.
Credit is better news. New lenders broaden financing but make loan terms harder to compare, JLL notes; for Italy, though, the improvement is concentrated precisely in debt markets and alternative sectors, thanks to more available data.
The cost of staying outside
Twenty-five years to change tier show that transparency is built slowly. The interventions with the best cost-to-impact ratio are administrative rather than financial: making deed data available in enough detail for valuations, and stabilising interpretative practice on fees, standards and building parameters. Each would reduce a margin that investors now price into returns and that Italian owners, without seeing it, pay through lower values.