Villa Angelina in Lucca, Tuscany, Italy (Credit: Concierge Gardens)
The Tuscany region of Italy’s status as a tax haven has local homeowners and real estate brokers seeing green.
Italy’s government in 2017 passed a law that created a flat income tax for new residents of Tuscany. New residents of the region have to pay only a 100,000-euro tax, or about $124,000, on all income generated outside of Italy.
More than 400 new residents have taken up the offer to establish residency in Tuscany, and the influx of high-net earners has set the local luxury real estate market on fire, according to Forbes.
As a result, the auctioning of countryside mansions in Tuscany has taken off. A villa on 27 acres is headed to auction and could command a price of $32 million, Forbes reported. The villa has eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, an indoor swimming pool, library and private cinema.
This isn’t the first time Italy’s government has enticed new residents with tax breaks and other freebies.
In some rural Italian hamlets, buyers can buy historic fixer-uppers for 1 euro. Italian couples who have a third child also are being offered free land in Southern Italy, an area hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis. Italy’s government also has sought to sell nearly $2 billion of state-owned real estate in an effort to ease the government’s debt burden.
[Forbes] — Joe Ward
Powered by WPeMatico