How Brixfox Computes Its Italy Numbers

The catalogue: Idealista homes where we track Airbnbs, published region by region

The Italian catalogue is villas and apartments advertised on Idealista in the comuni of the vacation regions we hold Airbnb calendar data for: Puglia, Sicily, Tuscany, Sardinia, the Amalfi Coast and the Bay of Naples, Liguria, Umbria, Lake Garda, Lake Como, Lakes Maggiore, Orta and Iseo, the Dolomites, South Tyrol and the Lombardy Alps. Each listing is read on its own page — price, rooms, photographs, the agent's description — before it is scored.

A region is published only once its listings have passed our readiness checks: read on their own page, pinned, priced against comparable Airbnbs and photo-checked. Until then its homes are held back, and the region's live Airbnb data is shown on its own. Plots, commercial premises, garages and ruins, and homes without a bedroom count, a photograph, a price or a rental estimate do not enter the browsable set, and a home advertised twice is shown once.

Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples and Bologna are out of scope on purpose. Their rules on short-term letting govern city stock — Florence has banned new tourist lets in its historic centre — and publishing a short-let yield for a home that may not be let short-term would be a false claim. They are excluded by coordinate, whatever region box surrounds them.

Prices are euro asking prices and stay in euros. They are asking prices, not closed sales, so treat a median as the top of the negotiating range. A listing is retired only when its own Idealista page says it has been removed, never because a search stopped showing it, and a delisting date is the day we detected the removal, not the day it sold. The seller is credited by name wherever the listing names one — the agency, never the portal.

Bedrooms: the agent's words first, a derived count marked indicative

Bedrooms are the only size input the comp engine receives, and Idealista does not publish a bedroom count. It publishes locali, which on an Italian house is every room — kitchen, living room and often the bathrooms — so a ten-locali villa is not a nine-bedroom one. Where the agent states the bedrooms in the description (“4 camere da letto”), that count is used.

Where the agent does not, the count is derived: a monolocale, bilocale or trilocale by definition, and for a larger home the rooms less the bathrooms less two, or no count at all when the bathrooms are unknown. A derived count must also leave at least thirty square metres of floor area per bedroom, the least spacious tenth of the homes whose count is not in doubt; below that the home is not priced. A home on a derived count prints its yield marked indicative, and never leads a yield sort, a top-picks shelf or a market figure.

Nightly rate and occupancy: comps by distance, annualised on the region's own season

The nightly rate and occupancy we project for a home come from the Airbnb listings we track around its coordinates — selected by real distance within an adaptive radius, never by comune name, and matched on bedroom count. Occupancy is derived from real availability calendars, tracked daily and diffed to detect bookings. Fewer than three comparable listings and we publish no revenue at all; fewer than ten and the figure is marked indicative and never ranks.

What we observe is a window of a few months, and Italy holds several seasons: the coast and the islands peak in July and August, the lakes and the countryside carry long shoulders, and a ski resort peaks in winter. So the window is turned into an annual occupancy on the comparables' own regional curve — thirty-six months of monthly occupancy per region from AirROI, a third-party dataset, with the long-term trend removed — rather than multiplied up as if every month looked like the one we saw. Where the comparables straddle several regions, a single national curve is used instead. A ceiling per region, below the summer occupancy we have measured there, then caps what remains plausible over a whole year.

Nightly rates are the hosts' asking rates: Airbnb's calendar does not reliably return the price a night actually booked at. The comp rate is therefore discounted to a booked rate with a factor of 0.94, measured for Italy against a third-party benchmark on forty listings. A view or a pool that the photo analysis finds adds 10% to the rate each — below the premium we measured on Italian Airbnbs (a median 1.14 times the rate for a view, 1.33 times for a pool), because an asking-rate premium read on a subset is not a booked one. Image quality, style and finish move the BrixfoxScore, never the rate.

Our own night-by-night calendar history for Italy starts in summer 2026, so no Italian winter has been observed yet, and every market page prints the completed months its figures cover. South Tyrol has no measured regional curve and is not published. The Dolomites and the Lombardy Alps are annualised on winter-peaked curves from AirROI's three observed winters, but our own calendars have not yet seen a ski season there, so read their yields with that in mind.

The all-in cost: what an Italian purchase actually costs

Every yield is divided by the all-in acquisition cost, never the asking price alone, and the stored breakdown is printed line by line on each home's page as “True Investment Cost”:

• Registration tax on a resale. Buying a second home from a private seller, the imposta di registro is 9% of the cadastral value — not the price — with a €1,000 minimum, plus €100 of fixed mortgage and cadastral taxes. We do not know a listing's rendita catastale, so the cadastral value is modelled at half the price: slightly above the national average, which errs towards a higher tax and a lower yield.
• VAT on a new build. Buying new from a developer, 10% VAT on the price plus €600 of fixed taxes applies instead; the 22% rate for luxury cadastral categories is not modelled, because a listing does not state its category.
• The notary, scaling with the price, VAT included.
• The buyer's own agency commission. In Italy both sides pay the agency: 3% of the price with a €3,000 minimum, plus 22% VAT.
• Legal fees for a non-resident buyer — a lawyer, the survey, a translated deed and a power of attorney: 1% of the price between €2,500 and €9,000, plus 22% VAT.
• Furnishing: €30,000 for a villa, €12,000 for an apartment.

Net yield: fully managed, after the cedolare secca

The headline number is what a fully-managed owner of one let property keeps. From the projected gross rent come the operating lines, each printed on the property page:

• Rental management at 22% of gross plus 22% VAT, which a private owner cannot reclaim.
• Booking-channel fees at 4% of gross, and cleaning and consumables at 5% of gross, net of what guests pay.
• Utilities: €4,500 a year for a villa, €1,500 for an apartment.
• IMU, the municipal property tax on every second home: the cadastral value revalued on its IMU basis, times the comune's own rate read from the Ministry of Finance rate sheets — 1.06% where a comune is not yet in our table.
• TARI, the municipal waste tax: €4.50 per square metre of floor area, with a minimum of €500 for a villa and €300 for an apartment.
• A maintenance reserve of 0.5% of the price, and insurance: €900 for a villa, €300 for an apartment.
• An apartment's condominio fees, €1,500 a year.
• A commercialista to file the tax, €1,200 a year.

Then the tax. Short lets are taxed under the cedolare secca, a flat tax on gross rent that replaces income tax on it: 21% on one let property, 26% on a second, and from the third property the letting is treated as a business with a partita IVA. Because it is charged on gross it is owed whatever the costs, so it is the same bill in both scenarios. Every yield on this site is the single-property case at 21%. The result, never below zero, is divided by the all-in cost.

The self-managed figure beside it drops the management commission and the commercialista and keeps everything else, including the channel fees, which a self-managing owner pays too.

Capital appreciation is shown separately from the yield, at 2.5% a year. The five-year combined return deducts no capital-gains tax, because Italy exempts the gain on a home held for more than five years (TUIR art. 67); a sale inside five years is taxed at 26%. That is the model's most flattering assumption, and it is stated here rather than left implicit. Everything is before home-country tax and before financing; confirm the treatment with an Italian commercialista.

Ownership: freehold

Italian homes are bought freehold — full ownership of land and building — so there is no lease term to discount and no tenure choice to make. EU citizens buy freely; other nationalities buy under Italy's reciprocity rule. A codice fiscale and an Italian bank account are the practical prerequisites.

Registration: the CIN, disclosed by the listing, never asserted by us

Every Italian short-term rental needs a national CIN (Codice Identificativo Nazionale), shown on every platform listing and at the property, on top of the regional code most regions require (the CIR or CIS). Letting without one has been fined €800–8,000 since 2 January 2025, and a listing that does not display it €500–5,000.

The national database sits behind an authenticated portal, so there is no public register we can check a code against. A home's position is whatever its own advertisement discloses, labelled as exactly that: a printed CIN reads “CIN disclosed”, a printed regional code “regional code disclosed”, a claim of a registration with no code “registration claimed”, a stated restriction on short-term letting a warning, and a listing that says nothing — most Italian for-sale advertisements — nothing stated, an open question for the agency rather than a red flag. The general note on the CIN that accompanies every listing is market context, not a finding about the home.

None of this states that a home may be let short-term, and no page on this site does. A CIN is issued to the operator of a unit and does not pass with the sale: the buyer files the regional code and the CIN again under their own codice fiscale, and a commercialista should confirm the comune still accepts new short-term lets before any rental income is underwritten. That line is printed under every registration position, including the strongest.

Location precision, stated honestly

Idealista blurs the pins it publishes, so a home's coordinate is approximate unless the listing gives an exact address, and its page says which. Comps are drawn from a radius several times wider than the blur, so the comp set is the right neighbourhood; the pin is not the right doorstep. A listing with no usable coordinate is placed on its comune, and its page labels the estimate an area estimate.

When we show no number

A projection with too little behind it is worse than none. With fewer than three comparable listings, or a derived bedroom count the floor area cannot carry, the home publishes no revenue and no yield. Where the implied gross yield on the all-in cost is above 20% — the point at which the likelier explanation is a mis-read price rather than an exceptional home — the figures are withheld and the listing is marked under review; such a home cannot wear an A or A+ badge on its other pillars. A home whose asking price moves is re-priced before its yield is shown on the new price. And a market-level figure — the landing's top-cohort net, a region card, the intelligence strip — is only printed once a region has published homes to compute it from.