OMI values and yields for commercial property

What is a square metre of shop space in central Trieste worth, and what does it let for? The nearest public answer comes from the Property Market Observatory (Osservatorio del mercato immobiliare, OMI) of the Italian Revenue Agency. Every half-year, for every zone of every Italian municipality, it publishes one range for sale values and one for rents, by building type and by grade.

We read those ranges for the OMI zones of Trieste and for the municipalities of Friuli Venezia Giulia where commercial property changes hands: Udine, Pordenone, Gorizia, Monfalcone, Grado, Lignano Sabbiadoro, Muggia and Duino Aurisina. Five building types: shops, offices, warehouses, industrial buildings and workshops. Each line links to the zone’s page on the Revenue Agency’s website, so that anyone can check it.

Two things are worth knowing at the outset, especially for a reader used to valuation reports or to rents quoted deal by deal. OMI ranges are the Agency’s estimates for the grade stated; they are not the prices of individual transactions. And they are published by zone, not by street: they describe the market a property sits in, not the property itself.

A range is not a distribution. The lowest and highest figures show where the Observatory places current values for that zone, building type and grade; they say nothing about how many sales fall in between. That is why we never rank a value statistically within the range: a figure sits “within the range”, nearer the bottom or nearer the top.

Grade. For some building types OMI quotes two grades, normal and prime (ottimo). For shops the grade is the trading position: a prime pitch on a shopping street against an ordinary one.

Areas are gross. OMI values and rents refer to gross floor area, not to the net usable area that many listings quote. A reader who thinks in GIA or NIA should not read one as the other.

The estimated gross yield is our calculation: the average rent of the range over twelve months, divided by the average value. It is the ratio between two OMI estimates, not the yield of a property, and it takes no account of taxes, vacancy, maintenance or management. To run the sum on a real case, there is the yield tool.

The change is year on year: the average value for a half-year against the same half-year a year earlier, and only where the zone boundary has stayed the same. We publish no changes over several years: in some zones OMI has altered its grades or redrawn the boundary, and the comparison would mix different measures.

• In Gorizia and Monfalcone the OMI values and rents do not square with each other: the ratio would be off the scale, so we state no yield. The same goes for the few lines the source flags as outside its thresholds.
• The quotations also cover the land-register municipalities; the transaction statistics do not. For Trieste and Gorizia there is no national count of deeds: another page of the Observatory explains why.
• No quotation by street or by building: a corner shop on a busy street and one in a side street sit in the same zone.
• The tables stay on this page and cannot be downloaded: the licence to redistribute the quotations has yet to be clarified. The new half-year is normally released in mid-October and mid-March; when it is, the tables are rebuilt from the source.