Selling your Friuli house to a buyer from abroad: who is looking, and what they ask

People, not messages: three emails about one house count once. Between October 2025 and October 2026, 236 buyers asked us about a house in Friuli Venezia Giulia outside the city of Trieste. This is where they were looking (one person can look in two areas):

Demand follows the houses we had on offer: in the mountains it gathered around Forni di Sopra, Sappada and Tarvisio, where we were selling. Where we had nothing, the count is zero, which does not mean nobody is looking.

On the coast near Trieste, buyers often come from over the border. Over two years, among those who asked about Duino Aurisina, Muggia or the Karst and whose nationality we know, 45% were not Italian. Austria leads (23 people), then Slovenia (17) and Germany (15).

In the rest of Friuli the picture changes: 6% foreign in the last 12 months, 20% over two years. Those who ask us about a house in Friuli outside that area are today almost always Italian, and found it on a portal.

That is not because nobody abroad looks at Friuli: we simply have not reached those buyers yet, and we say so.

A figure from outside our group helps. The Bank of Italy asks travellers who live abroad where they stayed. From 2021 to 2025, the share of their nights spent in a home they own was 10% in this region and 4% in Italy as a whole. Residents of Austria account for 29% of those nights, residents of Germany for 28%.

• Grado alone has 21% of the region's own-home nights, 77% of them Austrian.
• Lignano: Austrians 58%, Germans 30%.
• Trieste: Germans 61%.

These are nights, not purchases: no official source we found, neither the notaries' statistics nor the Revenue Agency's, publishes home purchases by nationality for the region. Still, for a seller the point stands: Austrians and Germans already keep homes here, and use them.

The questions are always the same, and listings rarely answer them:

• how far it is from home: Munich, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Ljubljana;
• how many minutes to an emergency department;
• how much sun reaches it in December;
• what it costs each year: in this region a regional tax, ILIA, stands in for IMU, and the first ‘second home’ a person names on the Region’s online service is taxed at no more than 0.70% (the guide);
• how a foreigner buys in Italy (step by step).

The full list, with what to have ready: what buyers check.

In the rest of Friuli, 88% of buyers write to us about a house they have seen, not about an area: they move when a listing convinces them. So the work lies in the presentation, and in where it can be found.

• Italian portals, which today bring us 79% of the buyers for houses in Friuli.
• The group's websites: triestevillas.com and the sites devoted to Lignano, Sappada and Slovenia.
• This library: answers in Italian, English, German and Slovene for people choosing where to live in Friuli, so that a guide leads on to a house.

How we present a house, step by step: our method. To start: selling with FriuliVillas.

• They are distinct people who wrote or phoned, counted in the group's CRM between October 2024 and October 2026. Only totals are published, never data on a person or a house; they measure the response to our houses, not the whole market.
• Nationality is what our records hold, often inferred from the phone prefix, so an Italian mobile counts as Italian. Shares are worked out on those for whom it is known.
• The Bank of Italy figures count nights reported in a survey, not sales.