Coop 2018 report. Italians have their homes on their minds (furnishing, DIY and gardens)

This page is also available in: Italiano

According to the  Coop 2018 report, forecasts from Nomisma suggest that real estate sales in Italy should total nearly 566,000 this year (a 4.3% increase on 2017), and rise to around 595,000 in 2019 (+5.1% on the forecast result for 2018). These are figures that  bear witness to a renewed willingness to invest.

They are also estimates that seem to show that the home is once again uppermost in the minds of Italians. Confirmation of this also comes from the research company CRIF, which has analysed trends in applications for new loans, new mortgages and loan subrogations. It found an increase in applications for amounts of between 150 and 300 thousand euros in the first half of 2018, and a drop in demand for sums in the 0-75 thousand euro bracket, which reflects a new awareness among families of their borrowing capacity.

According to an Instapro survey, 64% of Italians say that the home of the future must be above all  comfortable. Fewer consider the most important thing to be its level of technology (29%) and design (7%). Looking in more depth the reasons why Italians place “comfort” at the top of this particular classification, we find that it is primarily “because I see my home as my place of refuge” (42%) and “because I want my home to be a place where I can truly relax” (35%).

Instapro figures also reveal that  four in 10 Italians would invest most money in their living room, followed by their kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.

With products like Google Home and Amazon Echo now appearing on the market, “smart home” systems are becoming more widespread in Italy: in 2017 around four in 10 Italians  declared that they had at least one digitally connected object in their home, and this is in spite of the fact that 51% of home owners are concerned about their privacy and the risk of cyberattacks.

The Stili d’Italia survey on Italian styles by the Ancc-Coop study group shows that 17.5% of Italians regularly use at least one domestic robot, while 40% would like to try one or go back to using one.

And even though one in ten Italians do not know what domestic robots are – this rises to 16% if we are taking about home automation devices  –, sales, in Italy, of IoT products for “smart homes”  were worth a total of 250 million euros in 2017, which is a 35% increase on the figure for 2016 (source: Osservatorio IoT, Milan Polytechnic). This is still considerably less than the values recorded in other European countries, such as  France (600 million euros), the UK (1.4 billion) and Germany (1.5 billion). Moving to the other side of the Atlantic, the “smart home” segment in the USA already has a turnover of just under 11 billion euros.

Rapporto Coop 2018: l’ecommerce