Home renovation, the new EU directive puts 2 properties at risk on 3- Corriere.it

Rigid application of the EU directive on energy saving in buildings as expected would have devastating effects on the real estate market. Completely unthinkable that the deadlines set by Brussels can be respected (but there will be a negotiation between the Commission, the Council and the Parliament) for the number of buildings that would be involved in the works and for the necessary resources, higher, according to some estimates, than the value of a year of the country’s GDP. The story of the superbonus, which all in all is affecting a small part of the residential stock leaves no room for doubt: a potential demand increased by x times would correspond to a shortage of businesses and materials and a rise in costs and a drain on public finances also assuming that the works are carried out with 50% of the restructuring bonus.

Not to mention that many owners would not be able to pay the costs. Obviously, houses with bad energy classifications would be sold with great difficulty and with a steep discount, provided that they can still be sold and in Brussels they do not think of introducing, as announced in 2021, a ban on the transfer of ownership and leasing for energy-intensive buildings. Today in a city like Milan the issue of the energy performance of houses is more felt than a few years ago and expensive fuel is certainly accelerating the awareness of potential buyers but the price difference between new and used houses in good condition but in class G in the same area can be estimated at around 20%. With an acceleration of savings regulations, the gap could rise to 50% and more. But let’s see some numbers.

The buildings are divided into ten classes (class A of excellence in turn divided into four subclasses and from B to G, the one with the worst performance). For the energy classification of an entire building or a single residential unit, it is necessary to draw up a Ape (energy performance certificate) which is in fact mandatory only in three cases: if you want to sell or rent a property or if you submit it to renovations facilitated by the taxman (such as those for the superbonus) for which the law provides for it. As only a part of the buildings have an Ape it is not possible to give precise numbers for the unit but reliable estimates can be extracted from Istat and Enea data.

The first factor to take into account is the period of construction of the buildings: there are approximately 12.5 million residential buildings in Italy: 7,160,000 are prior to 1970 (attention to energy issues before the great oil crisis of 1973 was almost nothing), and in any case 11,230,000 structures are more than thirty years old and in the great majority of cases they consume energy. Every year Enea publishes the report on energy certifications, the latest edition was released in November 2022.

Energy certifications

Data on the certifications carried out in 2021 for residential properties (we limit ourselves to this area, the EU directive, we remind you, concerns all residential and non-residential properties) they say that 76% of the certifications resulted in one of the three worst classes, and in particular 34.3% of the units subjected to the assessment of the certifier belonged to class G. These are data (we see them in the table) which show only a very slight improvement compared to the cumulative data of the previous five-year period. The numbers are particularly worrying if we look at the buildings built before the great energy shock of the 1970s: 84.1% of energy-intensive buildings among the structures dated before 1945, 83.6% among those built between the end of the war and the 1975.

Number estimates

The Enea estimates, which we quote here, concern residential real estate units. Obviously for the redevelopment it will not be possible to concern the apartments but the entire buildings. Reeds, the Home Builders Association, estimates that out of the 12.2 million buildings in Italy, at least 9 were built before the entry into force of the most stringent regulations in terms of energy consumption entered into force in 1974, would not be in order and would be in need of redevelopment. On the basis of this data, the builders believe that, taking into account the exempt properties (for example houses with a surface area of ​​less than 50 square meters) at least two thirds of the properties surveyed (about 8 million) need to be renovated. If this were actually the case, the one-year forecast of GDP for total expenditure would be significantly underestimated.