In the current downturn of European real estate market, the sale of the bare ownership is creating a growing interest of market operators. The attention to this formula is not only local, but also comes from foreign investors, attracted by the substantial saving on the purchase price, the revaluation of the property over time, as well as the breakdown of the tax burden and the costs of management and maintenance. The aim of this research is, first of all, to deepen the knowledge of the bare ownership market of residential properties. Secondly, it is to develop an effective tool for estimating the bare ownership. Therefore, on the same database and with reference to the same explanatory variables of the price of bare ownership, two estimation models are implemented, one based on hedonic prices theory and another using artificial neural networks (ANN), in order to compare the respective performance.

The economic crisis of 2008 has highlighted the ineffectiveness of the banks in their disbursement of mortgages which caused the spread of Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) with underlying real estate. With the methods stated by the Basel III agreements, aimed at improving the capital requirements of banks and determining an adequate regulatory capital, the banks without the skills required have difficulties in applying the rigid weighting coefficients structures. The aim of the work is to identify a synthetic risk index through the participatory process, in order to support the restructuring debt operations to benefit smaller banks and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), by analyzing the real estate credit risk. The proposed synthetic risk index aims at overcoming the complexity of Basel III methodologies through the implementation of three different multi-criteria techniques. In particular, the integration of objective financial variables with subjective expert judgments into a participatory process is not that common in the reference literature and brings its benefits for reaching more approved and shared results in the debt restructuring operations procedure. Moreover, the main findings derived by the application to a real case study have demonstrated how important it is for the credit manager to have an adequate synthetic index that could lead to the avoidance of risky scenarios where several modalities to repair the credit debt occur.

Due to the forced changes that the COVID-19 pandemic has had in many aspects of ordinary life (working, social life, training and learning in schools etc.), the characteristics of domestic spaces have significantly modified buying, selling and renting decisions in the real estate market. The aim of this research was to structure a methodology, articulated into four steps, to assess the variation that has occurred in residential market demand as a result of COVID-19 anti-contagion measures, with regard to six metropolitan Italian cities. We considered two samples of properties for each city, the first referencing the pre-COVID-19 pandemic spread and the second collected in the current situation. Consequently, we were able to determine variations in residential market appreciations through the application of a regressive econometric technique. The obtained results highlighted the relevance assumed by indoor acoustic and thermal comfort property factors, compared with the pre-COVID-19 condition. The proposed methodology could be useful to support the public and private entities involved in urban investment decision-making processes, allowing us to identify the most appreciated factors of the residential real estate market demand, in order to improve the conditions of existing and future assets and reduce the related risk levels.

From the 21st century to the present(2021), a worldwide awareness that cities’ development must be based on projects for socio-economic growth and environmental protection is increasing. World governmental agencies and the European Union have suggested action strategies for the construction of «prototype cities» whose value must be founded on the inclusion and/or preservation of anthropic-natural elements and their effects on territories. In order to minimize the theoretical–practical gap between planning and project design with a view to sustainable development and the evaluation of their performance from economic, social and environmental points of view, the present contribution aims to outline a framework useful for systematizing the main scientific contributions concerning sustainability and the evaluation of urban transformation projects. The objective is pursued by analyzing bibliographic references with specific regard to the use of logical-operative methodologies used to rationalize the processes of interventions’ evaluation and selection. The task of examining the available literature is carried out with an investigation protocol of four sequential steps. From the implementation of the last one, the evidence expressing the heterogeneity of the examples in the literature is described. Accordingly, the theoretical-methodological framework for the project evaluation from an urban sustainability perspective is illustrated.