Quick answer: These two cities are 140 kilometres apart and have opposite problems. Turin has more dwellings than it has households wanting them; Milan has more households than it has dwellings. Every other difference between the two markets follows from that.
Property comparisons between Italy’s second and fourth cities usually turn on price per square metre, which describes the symptom. The cause is a supply imbalance running in opposite directions, and once you see it the rest of the comparison arranges itself.
Which side of the imbalance
Buy in Turin if you want the purchaser’s advantage. Abundant supply means choice, negotiating room and low entry prices, and a buyer who is patient can buy well.
Buy in Milan if you want the landlord’s advantage. Scarce supply means pricing power, short voids and a tenant who has fewer alternatives, at a price that leaves the yield thin.
The condition that reverses it: sustained population growth in Turin. The surplus is a stock, not a law of nature, and a city that starts adding households consumes its vacancy quickly. Turin has a large university and an industrial base in transition, and either could change the direction. Nothing comparable would move Milan the other way in the same period.
The numbers
National statistics on unoccupied dwellings put the two cities in different places entirely.
| Measure | Milan | Turin | Italy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unoccupied dwellings | Around 12.4% | Around 23.3% | Around 27.2% |
| Position | Far below the national rate | Close to the national rate | Among the highest in Europe |
The national context is worth stating because it explains why Italian investors treat vacancy differently from northern European ones. Italy holds in the order of 9.6 million unoccupied units, a share far above France at around 7.8% and Germany at around 4.4%. High vacancy alongside a housing shortage is a specifically Italian paradox, produced by inheritance patterns, by second homes and by the geography of where people have left.
Turin sits inside that national pattern. Milan is the outlier that does not.
What vacancy actually measures
Before drawing conclusions, it is worth being precise, because the statistic is regularly misread.
An unoccupied dwelling is one without a resident. That category includes:
- Second homes used for part of the year
- Properties held empty deliberately by owners
- Units awaiting sale or in the middle of a renovation
- Inherited property that heirs have not dealt with
- Genuinely abandoned stock
Only the last of those is dereliction, and it is a minority of the total in a large city. A high figure describes a market where a lot of housing sits outside the rental system, which is an inefficiency rather than a ruin. For an investor it matters because that shadow stock can return to the market when prices rise, capping the upside.
What each imbalance does to a buyer
In Turin the surplus works for you at purchase and against you afterwards.
At purchase, there is choice at every price point, sellers who have waited, and negotiating room that simply does not exist in Milan. Entry prices are a fraction of Milanese ones for comparable quality, and a buyer with cash and patience is in a strong position.
Afterwards, the same surplus is the competition. A tenant looking in Turin has options, which caps rent growth and lengthens voids on anything ordinary. A landlord who wants pricing power in that market has to own something genuinely better than the alternatives rather than merely adequate.
In Milan the imbalance does the opposite. Buying is competitive, prices are the highest in Italy and a buyer frequently pays close to the asking price. Letting afterwards is straightforward, voids are short and rent growth has been persistent.
Modelling either properly means using different void assumptions for the two cities rather than one national figure, on the method described in the rental yield guide.
What each city’s economy is
Behind the housing numbers sit two different economies, and their risks are not correlated.
Milan is Italy’s financial and professional centre, with the country’s strongest labour market, the deepest concentration of international companies and the highest share of residents born elsewhere. It is exposed to financial and professional services and to international sentiment.
Turin is an industrial city in transition, historically dominated by automotive manufacturing and its supply chain, with a large technical university, a growing technology and design sector and substantial public employment. It is exposed to manufacturing cycles and to the automotive transition specifically.
Those exposures fail at different times. For an investor with capital in the north, that is an argument for holding in both rather than for choosing, and the practical constraint is that Milan requires far more capital per unit.
The Piedmont guide covers Turin’s region, Turin has its own page, and the Milan guide with Navigli covers the Lombard side.
Where the surplus actually is
Vacancy in Turin is not evenly spread, and a buyer who treats a city-wide figure as a description of every district will draw the wrong conclusion.
The central districts and the better residential areas behave much more like a normal market, with limited stock and competition for good buildings. The surplus concentrates in the peripheral districts built for an industrial workforce that has shrunk, and in the older stock that needs work.
That has a direct consequence for strategy. Buying the average Turin property at the average Turin price gets the average Turin vacancy risk. Buying a good property in a district with its own demand does not, and the difference between those two purchases is far larger in Turin than the equivalent difference in Milan, where the whole city is tight.
- Identify the district’s own vacancy pattern rather than the city’s
- Establish which employer or institution supports demand in that district
- Prefer stock that is scarce locally, such as a flat with parking and a lift in an area that mostly lacks both
- Assume a longer void than a Milan model would use, and test the return at that assumption
What to do with the price gap
The gap between the two cities is large enough that the same capital buys very different things, and the comparison should be run on what the money buys rather than on rates per square metre.
A budget that buys a small central flat in Milan buys a substantially larger and better one in Turin, or several smaller ones. The Milanese unit is more liquid, more expensive to acquire and easier to let. The Turin units are cheaper, harder to let and offer diversification within one city.
Neither is the right answer for everyone. What is wrong is treating Turin as a cheap Milan, because it is not a version of Milan at all: it is a city with the opposite supply position and a different economy, which happens to sit an hour away by train.
For the other northern comparison a buyer might run, the Venice and Milan comparison sets Milan against a market with the reverse problem again, and the Milan and Rome comparison covers the documentary question that separates Milan from the capital. Outside the cities, Alba shows what a Piedmontese district with a working private employer looks like.
What a buyer actually does with this
Four practical consequences, in order of how much money they move.
Negotiate harder in Turin than you would anywhere else in northern Italy. In a market with this much standing supply, an asking price is an opening position rather than a valuation, and sellers who have been on the market for months know it.
Assume a longer void in Turin than a national model suggests. The rent you can achieve matters less than the number of months you achieve it for, and a model built on Milanese void assumptions will overstate a Turin return substantially.
In Milan, budget for the competition rather than for the negotiation. Good stock attracts multiple offers and a buyer who needs weeks to decide will lose properties. That is a process problem rather than a price problem and it is solved by having the finance and the advisers arranged before viewing.
Compare on capital deployed rather than on yield. The same money is one flat in Milan or several in Turin, and those are different risk positions, not two versions of the same one.
What the vacancy means for the buildings
A high vacancy rate has a physical consequence that a statistic does not convey: condominiums with a high proportion of empty units are harder to run.
Absent owners vote less, pay later and resist expenditure more, which slows decisions on the extraordinary works that older buildings need. A buyer in Turin should therefore read the condominium’s minutes with particular attention to how many owners actually attend and how quickly approved works get started, because those two facts predict the next decade of the building’s maintenance more reliably than its current condition does.
In Milan the opposite problem appears. Buildings are fully occupied, decisions get made, and the works get done, which is better for the fabric and shows up as higher condominium charges.
The wider northern picture
Neither city exists in isolation and a buyer with capital in the north has more than two options.
Milan’s own hinterland offers cheaper entry within commuting distance, at the cost of the city’s liquidity. Turin’s surrounding Piedmont carries the same demographic pattern as the city, in more concentrated form, with wine districts that trade on landscape rather than on employment. Bologna sits between the two on price and has an economy with more independent legs than either.
The reason to state that is to guard against a false binary. A buyer choosing between these two cities because those are the two they have read about is choosing from a short list they did not construct, and the northern market is large enough to reward a longer one.
What each city looks like in five years
Nobody knows, and the useful exercise is to name what would have to be true.
For Milan to remain the tighter market, its inflow of working-age residents must continue and construction must continue to lag it. Both have held for a long period and neither is guaranteed.
For Turin’s surplus to persist, its population decline must continue and the university and technology sectors must fail to offset it. That is the current trajectory and it is not a law.
A buyer holding Turin is implicitly betting that the surplus does not persist, because that is what would move prices. A buyer holding Milan is betting that the scarcity does. Both are positions rather than certainties, and it is worth knowing which one you have taken.
Three things a Turin buyer should insist on
A district-level vacancy picture, not a city-level one. Ask the agent how many comparable units are on the market within a few streets and how long they have been there.
Evidence of the condominium’s decision-making, in the form of attendance at recent assemblies and the interval between approving works and starting them.
A realistic void assumption in the model, tested by asking how long the seller’s own tenant search took the last time the flat was let.
A buyer who gets all three has converted an abstract statistic into a specific expectation, which is what separates buying well in a soft market from buying cheaply in one.
Why the national context matters
Italy’s vacancy problem is not a Turin problem, and understanding that keeps the comparison in proportion.
Roughly 27.2% of Italian dwellings have no resident, a figure far above France at around 7.8% and Germany at around 4.4%. That reflects a country where inheritance keeps property in families that do not use it, where second homes are widespread, and where the population has moved from many places toward a few.
Turin sits inside that national pattern rather than being an exception to it. Milan is the exception, and it is the exception because it is the destination the movement runs toward.
A buyer who understands that reads both cities correctly: Turin as a normal Italian market with a housing surplus, and Milan as the one large Italian city where the ordinary Italian arithmetic does not apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ask which side of the supply and demand imbalance you want to stand on. Turin has a surplus of dwellings, which gives a buyer choice, negotiating power and low entry prices, and gives a landlord competition. Milan has a surplus of households, which gives a landlord pricing power and gives a buyer none.
National statistics put unoccupied dwellings in Milan at around 12.4% and in Turin at around 23.3%, against roughly 27.2% for Italy as a whole. Turin's rate is close to double Milan's, and Milan sits far below the national figure while Turin sits near it.
It makes it a buyer's market rather than a bad one. Abundant supply means low prices, real negotiating room and stock available at every price point, all of which favour the purchaser. What it does not favour is a landlord assuming they can raise rents, because a tenant in Turin has alternatives.
Because demand exceeds supply. Milan draws working-age people from across Italy and abroad, has the strongest labour market in the country, and has not built at the rate that inflow requires. That is what produces both the low vacancy and the highest prices in Italy.
It depends on what the investment is for. Milan for income security and liquidity, at a price that leaves thin yields. Turin for entry price and yield on paper, with the risk that the yield assumes an occupancy the market does not guarantee. Neither dominates and the honest answer names the trade.
Sustained population growth in Turin, which would consume the surplus and turn the vacancy into scarcity. The city has an industrial base in transition and a strong university, and any durable reversal of its demographic trend would change this comparison faster than anything happening in Milan.
No, and that is a reason to hold both rather than choose. Milan is exposed to the financial and professional sectors and to international demand. Turin is exposed to manufacturing, to the automotive supply chain in transition, and to public sector employment. Their bad years need not coincide.
No, and conflating them is a common error. The statistic counts dwellings without a resident, which includes second homes, properties held empty by owners, units awaiting sale or renovation and inherited stock nobody has dealt with. A high figure describes an inefficient market rather than a ruined one.
Get an Italy property shortlist
Tell us your budget and region (Tuscany, Lake Como, Puglia, Milan, Sardinia). We reply within one business day with options matched to your goals.