While Spain is the European nation making all the headlines with regard its housing market collapse, Italy has quietly been experiencing its own decline. As Bloomberg notes, however, Italy shows no sign of stopping as falling prices may not be enough to stem a decline in Italian home purchases as the country's biggest group of buyers - those aged 30 to 40 - is set to shrink until the end of the decade. As the chart below indicates, housing transactions have followed the growth and contraction of this important 'buyers group' as it has plunged by more than 1 million people since 2005 (and is set to drop to only 8.3 million by 2020) and prices are set to follow. Of course, officials proclaim that prices have dropped enough to trigger a rise in purchases (for the first time since 2006); but, this runs counter to the more-than-decade-long demographic trend. But apart from that, Europe is recovering...
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Charts: Bloomberg