Le public administrations own 804 thousand properties but every year they spend over 1,2 billion euros for rents passive. This is what emerges from the proposals of the University's Mp3 Observatory Bocconi to prevent the real estate assets of the PA from continuing to drain more than 7 billion a year of maintenance and energy.
The properties in question are distributed throughout the peninsula (546 of which owned by the municipalities), for a value that is estimated to be in a range between 240-320 billion euros (July 2012 data on 53% of the registered assets), but only 2% of this patrimony is free and only a very small part is alienable.
As for the costs of maintenance, weighed 6,8 billion in 2014 on the budgets of local administrations (+38% since 2008), while only the energy expenses they weighed down the accounts of the central administration by 300 million euros and 160 million euros a year is the allocation for maintenance of the buildings managed by the state property. More than 2,7 million square meters of public buildings would need urgent energy redevelopment.
"A large part of what was immediately alienable has already been sold", says Veronica Vecchi, coordinator of the Observatory, "and policies on real estate should aim at rationalization and valorisation, which are medium-term operations, with a time horizon of 7 -10 years".
At the basis of the proposals of the Observatory there is a logistic unification of functions and administrations to be accomplished through a redevelopment of existing assets with sustainability criteria or the construction of new technologically advanced buildings, thus freeing up properties to be used for valorisation.
"However, we must not delude ourselves that we can implement a similar plan with public resources alone", adds Vecchi. “These should be concentrated in smaller interventions, generally below 5 million euros; While private equity and public-private partnerships should be the solution for larger operations, as has been done, in recent years, for the renewal of the hospital network in many regions of Northern Italy".
Responsibility for the process, in the proposal presented this morning, should be entrusted to a Control Room, coordinated by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, which would include the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the State Property Agency and CDP (Immobiliare ).
“The indicated action plan” concludes Alessandro M. Cremona, president of Goldmann & Partners and moderator of the conference, “can be traced back to the Managerial Flow, or to that managerial approach defined by the Bocconi MP3 Observatory to implement processes of radical change in public sector which starts from the definition of management actions to close gaps, from which assets are generated on which to build the achievement of complex development objectives. Among these assets, the construction of a new real estate culture, based on sustainability in its eight forms - territorial, social, environmental, anthropic, technological, energy, managerial and economic - is the first action to be taken and implemented. The Control Room should first of all establish the Sustainability Guidelines. Furthermore, it would be appropriate to introduce Building Information Modeling, as has been done in the UK where it is mandatory in all public tenders, to achieve savings of between 10% and 30% on the development costs of new investment property”.
