Senior housing: a young market with strong demographic fundamentals
Senior housing is emerging as one of the most promising segments of the Italian real estate market, at a time when the traditional residential market is slowing and institutional investors are redirecting capital towards asset classes capable of generating stable and predictable cash flows — from data centres and student housing to healthcare and senior living. The broader living sector, which includes senior housing and student accommodation, attracted approximately €1.2 billion in investment in Italy in 2025, up 40% from the previous year, according to JLL/Nomisma data. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the healthcare and nursing-home segment attracted more than €200 million through just two transactions. While modest in absolute terms, the figure is seen by market participants as a sign of the growing institutionalisation of a sector that is still in its early stages. Demographic fundamentals help explain the sector’s structural appeal. Italy is one of the world’s oldest countries, with people aged 65 and over now accounting for almost one-quarter of the population. The old-age dependency ratio is expected to rise from 39.8% in 2026 to 66.8% by 2080.
At the same time, supply remains significantly below demand: Italy has 512 nursing-home beds per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with an EU average of 699 and more than 1,100 in Germany, Sweden and Finland. The number of nursing-home beds has nevertheless increased by 36.5% since 2017, although supply remains concentrated in the Northeast and Northwest, while Southern Italy remains almost entirely uncovered. Expected yields are competitive with those of traditional office real estate, at approximately 5.3–5.5% per year according to some market estimates, while occupancy rates in major cities — with Milan leading the way — are approaching 95%.
From senior housing ownership to the rise of rental living
The shift in the way senior housing is accessed is particularly relevant for investors and family offices. Historically, Italian senior housing developed primarily as an ownership market: assisted-living apartments purchased outright within residential complexes offering dedicated services. The model is now shifting decisively towards rental. Unlike previous generations, today’s baby boomers show a much stronger propensity to monetise their existing homes — often large family properties that have become oversized for their needs in later life — and move into rental accommodation offering quality of life, services and security without the management and maintenance costs associated with a large property.
Bare ownership and senior housing: the link between two markets
This shift should be viewed alongside another trend affecting Italy’s wider residential market: the growing number of sales of bare ownership (nuda proprietà, whereby the seller keeps the right to live in the property) by homeowners aged over 65. Rising healthcare costs and uncertainty over the adequacy of future pensions are encouraging an increasing number of elderly homeowners — often living in large properties inherited or purchased decades ago and now difficult to maintain — to monetise their homes while retaining the right to live in them through a usufruct (life interest) or, in a more radical scenario, to sell the property entirely and use the proceeds to finance a move to more suitable accommodation. On the demand side, younger buyers (aged 45–54) are also showing growing interest in bare ownership as a long-term investment opportunity, often more affordable than purchasing a property outright.
Why rental senior housing could attract new capital
The connection between these two trends is economic as much as demographic. Selling the bare ownership or full ownership of a large home can release immediate capital that can then be used to cover the rent — typically under a multi-year agreement and including services — of a senior housing unit, without tying up capital in a new full-ownership property purchase. For older residents, the advantage is the conversion of an illiquid and costly-to-maintain property asset into a dedicated source of income to finance housing and care. For institutional investors, meanwhile, this dynamic creates a pool of potential tenants with genuine spending capacity and a multi-year contractual horizon — precisely the profile of stable cash flows that the market is increasingly seeking. In effect, the mechanism recycles capital from the traditional residential market towards the rental senior living asset class. As the two trends develop in parallel, this dynamic could become increasingly significant.
Senior housing in Italy: key operators and investors
Several major operators and investors are already active in the sector.
- Sereni Orizzonti, a Friuli-based group led by Massimo Blasoni, is currently the leading private operator in Italy’s social and healthcare sector. It has a development plan worth more than €200 million covering 20 new nursing homes and 2,400 additional beds over the next five years, across Piedmont, Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Veneto, Lombardy and Sardinia. Its subsidiary 3AMilano, focused on Northwestern Italy — the country’s highest-income area on a per-capita basis — aims to reach 1,400 operational beds by 2027.
- Korian, an international group, operates a network of nursing homes, residential care facilities, assisted-living apartments and day-care centres in Milan, making it one of the sector’s established players with a consolidated urban presence.
- Investire SGR, part of Banca Finnat and already a leader in social housing with more than €1 billion invested in the segment, has taken a prominent role in institutional senior housing by managing the fund behind the Spazio Blu project.
- CDP Real Asset SGR, the real estate asset management company of the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti Group, launched the pilot Spazio Blu project together with INPS, Policlinico Gemelli and Investire SGR. The €130 million project in Rome involves the redevelopment of 300 INPS-owned apartments into intergenerational senior housing, integrated with social and healthcare services and telemedicine. The model was subsequently replicated in Milan.
- Redo SGR and Ream SGR, which has been active in social real estate since 2008, are among the operators most involved in affordable senior living, with a focus on combining affordability, intergenerational living and below-market rents.
- International funds and groups such as Azimut are also becoming increasingly active, treating senior housing as a ‘countercyclical’ asset class relative to the traditional real estate cycle.
Milan: a laboratory for rental senior housing
Together with Rome, Milan is emerging as one of the Italian markets where rental senior housing is reaching its most advanced forms. Several projects illustrate the different stages in the evolution of the product.
Milan: from residences to nursing homes, the first models
One established model is the residence located alongside a nursing home. On Via Quarenghi, Senior Residence Milano offers 16 rental units — studios and one-bedroom apartments designed without architectural barriers — for independent or partially independent residents, with access to the care services provided by the adjacent nursing home. The format is still relatively small-scale, but it illustrates the transition from traditional nursing homes towards intermediate rental solutions that combine independence with access to support services. Similarly, Sereni Orizzonti/3AMilano operates the I Mulini nursing home in Milan’s Lambrate district and, in the metropolitan area, the Centro Polifunzionale per Anziani (multipurpose centre for the elderly) in Cusano Milanino.
Ex-Trotto San Siro: senior housing becomes part of urban regeneration
The most significant project, both in terms of scale and the signal it sends to institutional investors, is the redevelopment of the former Trotto racetrack in San Siro. On a 130,000-square-metre site that has been unused since 2012, international developer Hines, in partnership with CDP Real Asset SGR, is carrying out an urban regeneration project that includes 360 senior housing units for independent residents over the age of 65. All units are intended for rental at regulated rents and will include social and healthcare services as well as communal spaces. Construction was expected to begin by the end of 2025, with the opening scheduled for 2027. It is the first senior housing project in Milan conceived from the outset at institutional scale and entirely around a rental model, and is therefore likely to become a benchmark for investors looking at the Italian market.
Senior housing in Italy: challenges for investors
Several issues still need to be addressed before the sector reaches the level of maturity seen in leading European markets such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany. These include a regulatory framework that is not yet fully uniform, limited awareness of the product among Italian consumers — who still tend to associate senior housing with nursing homes for non-independent elderly people rather than with a voluntary housing choice for active seniors — and a strong geographical concentration in Northern Italy, leaving the South almost entirely uncovered. For investors, however, this very delay, combined with the structural convergence of an ageing population, a strained pension system and the growing willingness of older people to liquidate oversized property assets, represents a growth margin that is hard to match in other segments of Italian real estate.
