Who Can Afford to Buy a Home? Tourism Pressure and Profile-Based Housing Purchase Opportunities in Italian Cities

This study examines simulated mortgage-financed home-purchase opportunities across ten Italian cities from 2008 to 2024 in relation to tourism intensity, residential prices, local incomes and mortgage conditions. The unbalanced estimation sample includes 160 city-year observations, generating 960 deterministic scenarios for six representative household profiles. Price-to-income ratios, mortgage burdens and a Housing Opportunity Index are used to characterise these scenarios. Two-way fixed-effects models estimate city-year associations, while Random Forest and Histogram Gradient Boosting assess out-of-sample prediction under temporal and leave-one-city-out validation. At an assumed 30% mortgage-burden threshold, 64.4% of scenarios for young couples and higher-income households are classified as affordable, compared with 31.3% for young singles and 17.5% for tourism-sector workers. In the reported fixed-effects specifications, municipal income is positively associated with residential prices (β = 3.896; p = 0.033), whereas tourism intensity is not statistically significant in either the price (β = −0.147; p = 0.528) or price-to-income model (β = −0.088; p = 0.677). Random Forest performs well under temporal validation (R2 = 0.742) but not when transferred to an unseen city (R2 = −0.292). These percentages represent scenario frequencies, not shares of actual residents. The reconstructed tourism series and small number of cities limit statistical inference and do not support causal claims about tourism or conclusions regarding rental affordability.