In the questionnaire, the information about the tenure of the house of residence, inclusive of the usufruct, has been collected regularly since 1989. The questionnaire also includes a different item devoted to the “free of charge” use of the house, that does not involve any right on the property and is thus excluded from our analysis. The right to inhabit is instead missing among the provided modalities; it is plausible that the respondents in that condition chose the option “free of charge” or the residual option “other”. This implies a presumable underestimation of the situations of use rights that include both cases.

The share of households living in usufruct does not show a strong trend over time; it is on average around 3.5 percent between 1989 and 1998, 2.7 percent between 2000 and 2008, and 3 percent between 2010 and 2020. The shares show limited variations across geographical areas, while a significant concentration of the phenomenon emerges in households whose head is older than 65 years, with an overall average of 5.6 percent (Table A2, top panel). In just under half of the cases, the bare owners of houses granted in usufruct are the children of the occupants; in one-third of the cases, the bare owners are the parents, while in most of the remaining cases they are other relatives. The share of bare owners outside the family circle is limited, around 8 percent (Table A3, top panel). Overall, this result demonstrates that the usufruct contract is predominantly used for managing family properties for tax and intergenerational transfer purposes. Conversely, its usage among unrelated parties to monetize real estate beyond one's own lifetime is relatively modest.

In contrast to usufruct, homes occupied rent-free are primarily inhabited by young families, and little more frequently located in the Center and the South and Islands than in the North (Table A2, bottom panel). In half of the cases, the owners of these houses are the parents, while the opposite relationship is observed more rarely (around 13 percent). On the whole, the family circle absorbs on average 85 percent of the cases of houses occupied for free (Table A3, bottom panel).

According to what was stated in the previous section, we will add to the wealth of the households the value of the use rights for those who live in usufruct only, while overlooking the houses occupied for free that do not provide the occupants any right. The value of the usufruct right depends on the age of the reference person and is estimated based on the shares provided in official tables used for the computation of taxes (see Table A1 for 2023).

On the other hand, while there is a large amount of data for every property held by households, the information on the specific destination of usufruct (i.e. granted to others in usufruct) is not always available in SHIW. In many surveys (1989, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002) in the question about the use of the houses held, the item related to the “usufruct” is absent, and the cases are included in the “other” residual basket; in the 2020 questionnaire the term “usufruct” is explicitly recalled but only together to the “free of charge, from relatives and friends” that, as reminded earlier, does not imply rights and is thus a different condition. Thus, information on the properties granted in usufruct to someone else, useful for our analysis, is collected only in 1991 and from 2004 to 2016. The results reported in the next section will thus refer to these years only.

The share of such properties is small and quite irregular over time; on average it is equal to 0.9 percent of the residence houses for the four surveys up to 2008 and 0.8 percent for the four surveys from 2010 to 2016. The lower share found on this side, compared to that shown above for the usufructuary, could depend also on the fact that the usufruct is not necessarily a contract involving households on both sides; other entities (firms, banks, public institutions) could grant usufruct contracts. However, we have seen that many times it is a family matter. There is a likely effect of under-reporting behavior that affects the houses that are not used for residence (Cannari and D’Alessio, 1990 and 1993; Baffigi et al., 2016).

The value of the use rights on houses granted in usufruct must be subtracted from the wealth of the bare-owner households. However, in SHIW the information on the age of the usufructuary is