Buying a House in Italy as a Finnish Buyer: No Housing Company
An asunto-osake has no Italian equivalent, and the tax shows it: 1.5% at home becomes 9% in Italy, or 2% with prima casa relief. Here is what else changes.
In Finland the thing you buy is a bundle of shares. In Italy it is the apartment, and the habits built on the first do not survive the second.
Verohallinto, the Finnish Tax Administration, taxes an asunto-osake, meaning shares in a housing company, at 1.5% and real property at 3%. Italy has no housing company at all. An apartment there is real property inside a condominio, and the Agenzia delle Entrate charges 9% on a second home or 2% with prima casa relief.
| Tax and market | Rate (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| Italy, second home | 9.0% | |
| Finland, kiinteistö | 3.0% | |
| Italy, with prima casa relief | 2.0% | |
| Finland, asunto-osake | 1.5% |
What does a Finnish buyer assume will travel?
Three habits built on the asunto-osake, and not one of them has anything to attach to in Italy.
The first is the price. Verohallinto charges varainsiirtovero, the Finnish transfer tax, on the velaton kauppahinta, meaning the price with the buyer's share of the housing company's own borrowing added in. That is why a Finnish buyer reads the company's balance sheet before making an offer, and why the asking price and the taxable price are two different numbers at home.
The second is the filing. Verohallinto has the buyer declare and pay varainsiirtovero oma-aloitteisesti, on their own initiative, through the OmaVero service. Italy hands that job to the notaio, a public officer acting for both parties rather than for the buyer, who collects the taxes and registers the sale with the Agenzia delle Entrate and the Catasto. The Finnish buyer's own filing duty simply disappears.
The third is the rate. The 1.5% belongs to housing company shares specifically, and nothing on the Italian market is a housing company share, so nothing there can qualify for a rate designed around one.
What a Finn does not have to carry across is a nationality check. The reciprocity rule itself sits in article 16 of the preleggi, attached to Regio Decreto 16 marzo 1942 n. 262, and makes a foreigner's civil rights in Italy conditional, but the Consiglio Nazionale del Notariato puts European Union and European Economic Area citizens outside that condition.
Millesimi: what Italy uses instead of a housing company
A condominio, which holds no shares and carries no debt on the buyer's behalf, plus a set of thousandths that fix each flat's stake in the building.
Those thousandths are the millesimi. They measure how much of the shared structure belongs to each unit and how the spese condominiali, the building's running costs, get divided between the owners. There is no share register, no company balance sheet folded into the sale price, and no company borrowing that arrives with the apartment.
The building's finances have not disappeared; they have moved. In Finland they sit inside the price, through the debt component of the velaton kauppahinta. In Italy they sit in the condominio's accounts and in the spese condominiali, which makes them a separate document to read rather than a figure buried in the one you are negotiating.
Two reliefs a Finnish buyer has lost, and one still worth asking for
The first home exemption went in 2024 and the 1.5% share rate does not exist in Italy, but prezzo-valore is still available to anyone who claims it in the deed.
Verohallinto abolished the first home exemption for buyers aged 18 to 39 on 1 January 2024, so a Finnish buyer under 40 now pays the same 1.5% or 3% as everybody else at home. Crossing to Italy takes away the 1.5% column as well: the Agenzia delle Entrate charges imposta di registro at 9% for a second home bought from a private seller and 2% under the prima casa relief, plus a fixed imposta ipotecaria and imposta catastale of 50 euro each.
Prezzo-valore runs the other way. The Agenzia delle Entrate lets a private individual buying residential property have the registration tax worked out on the valore catastale rather than on the agreed price. It has to be requested in the deed itself, and there is no later application.
On a 400,000 euro home the Italian 9% comes to 36,000 euro and prima casa at 2% to 8,000 euro. The Finnish 1.5% on shares of the same value would be 6,000 euro, and the 3% on real property 12,000 euro. Four rates against one price, with no published comparison sitting behind it.
What Italy bills every year
IMU on the property, TARI on the waste and the spese condominiali on the building, every one of them detached from the purchase price.
IMU is short for imposta municipale propria, the tax a comune levies on buildings. Legge 160/2019 at article 1, commi 740, 748 and 754 fixes the structure, and the Dipartimento delle Finanze publishes the numbers: 0.86% as the base rate on a home that is not the owner's main residence, 1.06% as the highest a comune may go, and 1.14% where the former TASI maggiorazione had applied.
| Rate | Share of cadastral value (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| Base rate | 0.86% | |
| Comune ceiling | 1.06% | |
| Ceiling with former TASI maggiorazione | 1.14% |
What the rate multiplies is the valore catastale. TARI is the tassa sui rifiuti, the waste charge. The spese condominiali are the shared costs already described. If the apartment will be let out, the 2026 cedolare secca limits govern that income.
Where the numbers stop
Italy does not publish who buys by nationality. The Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare at the Agenzia delle Entrate does not break sales down that way, and neither do the Banca d'Italia, ISTAT, the national statistics institute, or the Consiglio Nazionale del Notariato. No count of Finnish buyers in Italy exists at source, and we are not going to assemble one.
We do not give buying or selling advice, and nothing above says whether an Italian property is worth buying. What the sources carry: 1.5% on an asunto-osake and 3% on real property at home, with no first home exemption since 1 January 2024, an Italian market with no housing company to buy into, 9% imposta di registro on a second home from a private seller against 2% with prima casa relief, 50 euro each for the ipotecaria and the catastale, a cadastral base only on request in the deed, and an annual IMU the comune sets between 0 and 1.06%.
AiMYNDi reads the listing, the condominio accounts and the legal paperwork for one specific property, so a charge on the registry entry or a pending building levy surfaces before the compromesso rather than after it. You can see an example of what a report looks like first.
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