Real Estate Market and Migrants’ Flows to Small Towns: Empirical Evidence from Sales and Rent Prices Analysis

The last twenty years’ increasing international migration flows are changing demographic, economic and spatial equilibrium of both urban and peripheral world regions. In particular, rural and inner areas are experiencing new phenomena of neo-population fostered by internal and foreign migrants’ arrival with the revitalisation of the abandoned city centres and rebalancing of socio-economics local systems. This article concerns the impact of migration flows on small Italian towns and centres, particularly by inspecting to what extent these demographic evolutions affect their real estate market. To this purpose, the article is mainly divided into two sub-sections. The first one introduces a mirror of the current Italian migrants’ profile, like their geographical distribution in the country and the role they play in inner areas revitalisation process. Then, an empirical analysis involves a set of Italian case studies, like small city centres with a high concentration of migrants’ communities. The purpose of this last section is to study the impacts on Real Estate Market prices and trends according to the following the research question: “Is migrants’ presence relevant in Real Estate Market trends of minor Italian urban centres and inner areas?”