Gallura had 21.7% of Sardinia's home sales in 2025 with about 10% of its people

What the Nomisma study says

The study is Nomisma's dossier "Impatto dei cambiamenti che investono la domanda abitativa in Sardegna. Conoscere la domanda per orientare l'offerta" (the impact of changing housing demand in Sardinia). Elena Molignoni, head of Nomisma's real estate market area, presented it in Olbia on Saturday 17 October 2026, at a public meeting organised by Confartigianato Imprese Sardegna and ANAEPA Edilizia Confartigianato, Confartigianato's building trades association. The full report has not been published; what is public comes from the organisers' release and from press accounts of the presentation.

According to the organisers, 15,119 of the 18,797 home sales recorded in Sardinia in 2025, more than 80%, took place in coastal municipalities. Gallura Nord-Est accounted for 21.7% of all sales in the region while housing about 10% of the island's population. The same study counted 319,000 homes without a permanent resident, a figure we covered after the presentation, and put Cagliari and Gallura together at 30,111 of Sardinia's 51,597 national identification codes (CIN) for holiday lets.

The nine-year comparison, checked

On 8 November GalluraOggi reported a figure that was not in the October releases: according to the Nomisma report, home sales in Gallura rose 86.1% between 2016 and 2025, against 48.3% in Italy as a whole. The newspaper gives no raw counts and does not say which municipalities make up Gallura in the calculation.

We checked what can be checked against the counts of the Osservatorio del Mercato Immobiliare (OMI), the property observatory of Italy's tax agency, which records home sales as normalised transactions (NTN):

Italy: 517,184 home sales in 2016 and 766,757 in 2025, an increase of 48.3%. The national figure matches.
Sardinia: 11,741 in 2016 and 18,820 in 2025, an increase of 60.3%.
Province of Sassari, which in OMI's tables still includes Gallura: 4,361 in 2016 and 7,490 in 2025, an increase of 71.7%; outside the city of Sassari the rise was 80.6%, from 3,349 to 6,050.

OMI publishes free provincial series only, and in those series Gallura sits inside the province of Sassari, so the 86.1% cannot be rebuilt from public tables. It is consistent with them: the part of the province outside Sassari city, which includes all of Gallura, grew faster than the island as a whole. On the two published percentages, Gallura's sales went from about 2,190 in 2016 to about 4,080 in 2025 (our calculation).

Where the sales happen

OMI's regional report for 2025, published on 5 June 2026, gives some of the local detail the study leaves out. Olbia recorded 1,239 home sales in 2025, close to the city of Sassari's 1,441, but from a much smaller stock: 43,982 homes against 65,832. That means 2.8% of Olbia's homes changed hands in a year, against 2.2% in Sassari, a gap OMI says is probably due to the nearby Costa Smeralda. OMI's eastern coast area of the province accounted for 3,019 sales, 40.3% of the provincial total and 7.6% more than in 2024.

Behind Castelsardo (4.1%), OMI lists Trinità d'Agultu e Vignola, then Loiri Porto San Paolo and Badesi at 3.4% each and Santa Teresa Gallura at 3.2%, among the municipalities in the province where the largest share of homes changed hands. Golfo Aranci and Arzachena had Sardinia's highest average values, two to five times the national average according to OMI, followed by Aglientu, Santa Teresa Gallura, Palau, Olbia, San Teodoro and Loiri Porto San Paolo.

What it means for a year-round home

A sales count shows how active a market is, not who it serves. None of these figures says how many of the homes sold became someone's main residence, who bought them, or at what price: OMI counts transactions, not values, and the public tables do not separate first homes from second homes at local level.

The rental side is where year-round residents feel the change. GalluraOggi reports that the study found rent indices in Gallura up 27.8% in coastal areas, 30.1% in inland areas and 33.9% in non-coastal areas between 2016 and 2025, and a move from long leases towards transitional contracts, without counting how many homes are affected. The newspaper itself concludes that the figures are not enough to say that Gallura is in a property bubble. Asking prices are a separate measure again: Olbia's asking prices rose faster than OMI's recorded values.

A note on the numbers

The 21.7% is a share of 2025 sales and the 86.1% and 48.3% are changes in the number of sales; neither says anything about prices. OMI's normalised transactions weight each sale by the share of ownership transferred, so selling half a home counts as 0.5. The 2025 OMI figures are provisional and the 2016 figures definitive; our totals add OMI's quarterly provincial series. Nomisma's 2025 total for Sardinia (18,797) differs slightly from OMI's (18,820), probably because the data were drawn at different dates. The roughly 2,190 and 4,080 Gallura sales are our own back-calculation from Nomisma's percentages and should be read as approximate until the report or municipal counts are published. OMI's areas do not follow Gallura's borders: part of the north coast falls in its western coast area. The rent changes are changes in an index, not in individual contracts, and are known only from GalluraOggi's account.

Rooftops of central Olbia, January 2016. Photo: Peterkz, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Sources: GalluraOggi, 8 November 2026 · Confartigianato Imprese Sardegna, release on the 17 October meeting · Algherolive, 18 October 2026 · ANSA, 14 October 2026 · Agenzia delle Entrate, OMI sales volumes by province, 2011 to 2025 · OMI, Statistiche regionali Sardegna 2026 · OMI, Rapporto Immobiliare 2026, residential