 Rome’s recent renaissance has spurred property prices, but buying in the Eternal City can still take forever. By LEE MARSHALL
We all know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. The city has been a work in progress for more than two and a half millennia, going through phases of rapid expansion – like its imperial heyday in the first and second centuries AD – and periods of equally spectacular decline. In the post-war years, the building boom of the 1960s was followed by a period of stagnation. As growth stalled, the city authorities patched together a series of stopgap solutions to the urgent need for new services and infrastructure generated by the rapidly growing population, which leapt from around 1 million in 1951 to more than 2.5 million in 2001. Even today, Italy’s capital only has two rather useless metro lines, although work on the third line, the Metro C, has finally begun after years of empty talk. Of course, this being Rome, phase one of the work is bogged down in a series of archaeological digs. Most foreign investors have tended to share the Milanese view of Rome as the parasitical city of government, where bureaucracy rules supreme and energy is expressed only in frivolous pursuits – cinema, tourism, la dolce vita – that have more to do with spending money than making it. Over the past decade, however, such clichés have lost touch with reality. Just when Milan is facing a crisis, with its large manufacturing sector threatened by Asian imports and the strong euro, Rome is on a roll. According to figures released by research institute CENSIS in March 2006, based on the period 2001–2005, employment in the capital is up (13.7% compared to a national average of 4.6%), business is up (a 9.2% increase in the number of companies active in the city) and tourism is buoyant, with 19.5 million overnight stays in 2005 (a 22.8% increase over 2001). But it’s not just the numbers that talk. There’s a new confidence in the air and a new civic pride among Rome’s residents, long used to grumbling about how their city is going to the dogs. Perhaps because it had so much ground to make up, Rome has, at least in some areas, leap-frogged several of the intermediate stages. For example, Wi-Fi-enabled laptop users can now surf the web from anywhere in the Villa Borghese Gardens and at several other hotspots dotted around the city.  More relevantly for investors, the city’s appetising but intricate property market is being given a breath of fresh air by an ongoing residential construction boom. According to a September 2006 study by Italian building industry research centre CRESME, €19bn flowed into the city between 2000 and the first trimester of 2006 in the form of building contracts. As always, the glamorous leading edge of the wave is represented by the public buildings commissioned from a raft of superstar architects. This includes Richard Meier, whose controversial Ara Pacis Museum, one of the few post-war new builds in the heart of the Centro Storico (historical city centre), opened in April 2006. Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI Museum in the northern suburbs is slated to open in 2008, and Rem Koolhaas is designing a new “City of Youth” on the site of Rome’s former wholesale produce market in Via Ostiense.
But beneath this attention-grabbing iceberg-tip is a much vaster push to modernise the city’s commercial, residential and service network. A key element of this urban renewal is the new master plan for Rome, the first since 1962. It was finally approved by the city council in March 2006, after more than a decade of proposals and counter-proposals. Research institute Ecosfera estimates that the master plan, or PNR, will generate investments totalling €40bn. According to Roberto Morassut, the head of the city’s planning department, the PNR, with its extensive green space allocation, “represents a point of equilibrium between the city’s need for growth and transformation and the need to protect the environment”. Morassut, who has travelled to the MIPIM fair at Cannes for the past five years to promote the city to potential investors, points out: “Rome now has a GDP equivalent to that of Singapore.” He claims that it is now possible to talk of “a true Roman renaissance, which is reflected in a massive programme of new building and urban transformation connected to a new demand for quality and to the relaunching of the city’s outer suburbs”. The makeover of the Periferie – the run-down outskirts of the city that grew up piecemeal in the 1960s and 1970s, often without proper planning permission – accounts for the lion’s share of the new builds. Eighteen centralità, or hubs of expansion, have been identified in this outer ring. Projects currently under way here include the Rione Rinascimento residential complex on the north-eastern edge of the city, a high-class estate that is being developed by Rome-based Mezzaroma Group. The 42-hectare site comprises two residential districts set on either side of a large park. High-calibre architects such as Michael Graves, Hans Hollein and Arata Isozaki have been drafted in to work on individual parts of the estate, which is divided into five tranches, the first of which will be ready in summer 2007.  As international estate agent Knight Frank’s Italian expert James Price points out, however, while such suburban developments may attract major funding investment from outside Italy, the resulting residential units are unlikely to be of interest to foreign buyers. “In a museum city like Rome, most non-Italian clients are looking for characterful, individual properties in the Centro Storico,” he says. These include what he identifies as a boom sector: high-value, multi-apartment boutique developments in restored city-centre palazzi.
According to Gerardo Solaro del Borgo, who heads the new Italian office of London-based property fund manager Cordea Savills, Rome is a “particular and unique real-estate market, partly because no two properties are the same”. He also believes that potential investors are often frightened off: “There has always been a problem of transparency in the Italian market in general, which is not so much to do with shady dealings as with the difficulty of getting access to accurate, unbiased information.” As a veteran of the Italian property fund sector, del Borgo says the only way around this is “to find an experienced local contact” who knows the ropes. “You can’t hope to just pick up the phone in London and buy in Rome,” he smiles. “It’s more complicated than that.” |