The fall prior to the pandemic, my partner and I were traveling in northern Italy and ended our trip with 5 days in Piedmont. The region resonated with us. We both decided to retire at the beginning of the pandemic and while cocooning at home started to ponder our future together. In mid 2021, after reading a newspaper article about the reciprocal ability for Americani and Italiani to purchase property between our countries, the idea popped – what about buying a place in Italy?!
We started our research and found helpful resources (in english) which gave us a few tips and strategies for learning the basics of buying a property in Italy. There is no MLS, Zillow or RedFin in Italy. We found three good property search services:
These services allow you to input search parameters and will show you matching properties and you can save your searches so that new properties that meet the criteria will be emailed to you. After about a month of searching, we woke up to find a new property that check most of our boxes. It seemed like it might be THE apartment. We contacted the realtor via email and WhatsApp (most Italians use WhatsApp for messages) and received enough info to be very interested. It was the fall of 2021 and the pandemic subsided a bit so we planned a three week trip to Piedmont to look at the property we liked and to also look at all kinds of properties in a variety of cities and towns.
Upon arrival, our first priority was to see THE apartment we liked the most. We loved it! We wanted to make a quality decision so looked at about 8 other properties. The more we saw, the more certain we wanted to make an offer for THE apartment we fell in love with. So we did. And we waited, over three days, for an answer. The seller decided not to sell, period. No real explanation. It wasn’t because we were Americani. The apartment was taken off the market and remains off the market to this day. We started widening our search. The apartment was located in San Damiano d’Asti, a town of 8,000, located about half way between Asti and Alba. It was an old town but sleepier then we expected. We had convinced ourselves prior to putting an offer on THE apartment that the proximity to Asti and Alba would compensate for the lack of life in San Damiano. Now that we were starting with a blank slate, it became clearer what we were looking for.