Exploring the role of condominium administrators as aggregators in the energy community landscape: An empirical analysis in the Italian context

Collective self-consumption initiatives, such as renewable energy communities and jointly acting renewable self-consumption schemes, are increasingly promoted as socially embedded solutions for the energy transition. However, their diffusion in multi-unit residential buildings - i.e., condominiums - remains limited, due to coordination costs, governance complexity, and weak intermediary structures. The paper investigates condominium administrators as potential aggregators in the residential sector, addressing a gap in the literature that has largely overlooked building-level governance actors. The analysis is based on a survey of 170 Italian administrators managing over 9000 buildings and 186,000 housing units. Results show moderate but highly heterogeneous engagement. Administrators’ willingness to act as aggregators is weakly associated with age and remuneration but strongly driven by education level and technical background. Administrators with postgraduate qualifications and engineering profiles exhibit the highest propensity to engage, while those operating within larger, more structured organizations show greater openness to complementary business activities. Findings suggest that the scalability of collective self-consumption in condominiums depends less on financial incentives alone and more on professional skills, organizational capacity, and intermediary roles embedded in local governance structures.