319,000 Sardinian homes have no permanent resident, a total already published in April

What the conference reported

The event, La nuova domanda abitativa come opportunita per le imprese edili artigiane della Sardegna, was held at the Blu Marine Conference Center in Olbia on 17 October 2026, organised by Confartigianato Imprese Sardegna and ANAEPA Confartigianato Edilizia. Reported figures from the Nomisma dossier include:

About 319,000 of roughly 1,049,000 homes without permanent residents, 30.4%, with the share above 50% in inland areas
15,119 of 18,797 property sales in 2025 on the coasts, more than 80%, with Gallura Nord-Est at 21.7% of regional sales
Housing and utilities at 33.5% of Sardinian household income, against a European average of 26.6%, and about 40% of the monthly consumption budget
Building permits for new homes up 9.4% in 2025, against a national fall of 6.1%

A separate figure, that 61.3% of occupied homes were built before 1980, is attributed to Confartigianato Sardegna's own research office rather than to Nomisma. Age on its own does not establish that a building is in poor repair or uninhabitable.

Giacomo Meloni, president of Confartigianato Imprese Sardegna, said of the trend: Non possiamo considerare questo scenario inevitabile e irreversibile, we cannot treat this scenario as inevitable and irreversible. Stefano Crestini, national president of ANAEPA Confartigianato Edilizia, said: la sfida dell'edilizia non e piu costruire nuovi agglomerati, ma riqualificare il patrimonio esistente, the challenge for construction is no longer to build new developments but to renovate the existing stock. Both quotes are as reported from the conference floor.

The same total was published in April

On 11 April 2026 ANSA reported figures presented by AIGAB's research centre at the Extra2026 event in Cagliari: 1,049,263 homes in Sardinia, 319,211 of them without resident occupants, and 37,094 advertised online for short stays. Those are the October totals, to within rounding.

Two studies from different organisations arriving at an identical housing stock and an identical no-resident count is what you would expect if both rest on the same ISTAT baseline, not evidence that the figure has risen. Neither the reference year nor the underlying tables have been published, and we have asked Nomisma and the organisers for both. Until they arrive, the figure should be read as a stock estimate of uncertain vintage, not as a measurement of this year.

The percentages reported before and after the conference also differ. ANSA's 14 October preview used 320,000 and 32%; post-conference reporting uses 319,000 and 30.4%. The arithmetic supports the later pair. One home in a thousand cannot move a percentage by 1.6 points, so a different denominator or a loose approximation lies behind the earlier figure.

What the category actually counts

The Bank of Italy states plainly that the ISTAT data for this category cover homes that are unoccupied, that is empty, or occupied only by people who are not resident there. A family's second home, used every August, sits in the same total as a collapsed house in a depopulated village and a flat let to tourists.

That makes several common operations unsafe. Subtracting the 51,597 CIN codes from the 319,000 no-resident homes does not yield a count of genuinely empty houses: the two are differently defined, differently dated, and no one has shown that every registered code corresponds to a dwelling inside that stock total. One account of the conference divided the two to get 16.2%; the division is arithmetically correct and tells you nothing about subset membership. CIN registrations also cover more than whole-home rentals, and a registration is not proof of current trading.

What the independent evidence shows

The Bank of Italy's regional report for June 2026 is the most useful independent check, and it cuts both ways. It counts 47,217 properties in Sardinia used for short-term letting at the start of the second quarter of 2026, 96% of all tourist structures against 91% nationally, and about three tourist units per hundred inhabitants, the highest incidence relative to population in southern Italy. In tourist municipalities 38% of homes have no resident occupants, against 26% elsewhere, and the average price in 2024 was 1,587 euro per square metre against 714 euro in non-tourist municipalities.

The same report then complicates the story. Its price-to-income ratio is 9.8 in tourist municipalities against 5.3 elsewhere, but between 2015 and 2024 that ratio fell in almost all Sardinian municipalities, and more sharply in the tourist ones, because incomes per head grew faster than prices. High price levels and improving affordability over time are both in the official data. The report describes a positive association between private tourist accommodation and the ratio; it does not quantify a causal effect on rents.

Why a building is not a housing supply

A dwelling only counts as housing when it matches a household's location, budget, condition and access needs. A house in an inland comune that lost its school and bus service is not interchangeable with a year-round flat near an Olbia workplace, whatever the regional percentage says. Seasonality matters too: an apartment offered from October to May can serve a student or a seasonal worker and still fail a family that needs a continuous tenancy.

The renovation argument made at the conference is a real mechanism, and so is competition between tourist and residential use in particular neighbourhoods. Both can be true at once, in different places. Establishing which dominates where requires building-level evidence of prior use and actual post-renovation occupancy, not a regional ratio. Sardinia Blog is part of the Rental12 ecosystem, whose short-term rental business in Olbia and Golfo Aranci has published its own analysis making the renovation case. We note that connection, and treat that analysis, like the conference dossier, as a position needing documentary support rather than a settled finding.

A note on the numbers

None of the conference figures has been published with its underlying tables, so all of them are reported here as attributed claims, not verified counts. The reference year for the housing stock is unknown. The sales figures describe transactions in 2025, which measure market activity and not the supply of homes to rent. The 33.5% of income and 40% of consumption are different denominators and must not be added or compared with each other. The share of homes without permanent residents is a regional average that can hide heavy concentration in a few streets and near-zero elsewhere, which is why no municipal conclusion about Olbia follows from it.

Sources: ANSA, conference preview, 14 October 2026 · Sardegna Tomorrow, conference report, 17 October 2026 · San Gavino Monreale Net, conference report, 17 October 2026 · ANSA, AIGAB figures, 11 April 2026 · Banca d'Italia, L'economia della Sardegna, June 2026 (PDF) · ISTAT, occupied dwellings release, 11 February 2026 · RAI TGR Sardegna, 17 October 2026