Domains of description to understand real estate market in the historic cities

The real estate capital is one of the most resistant forms of the process through which the social surplus product was consolidated, making possible the development of cities. The gradual layering of these "traces" has given shape to structured and complex urban environments, characterized by the complementarity between homogeneity and heterogeneity. This led to the multiplicity of functions that properties gradually were able to play, and the expectations that these potentials have engendered in the players of its growing enhancement process: administrations, owners, large and small investors.This paper focuses on the interpretation of the urban pattern of the historic city through the analysis of the housing markets. The research deals with the case study of the town of Syracuse, a complex urban context from several points of view. Firstly, the city has a particular geographical and landscape planning; secondly the sequences of historical phases that have characterized its urban development; finally, the amount of public and private investments that over the past three decades have helped to make it one of the thirty major touristic destinations in the world.The formal and functional articulation of this real estate market justifies the use of different, layered and structured analysis tools to identify sub-markets and to place among them some unique properties as residual cases (gaps) or exemplary cases (overlaps). Those cases are traditionally considered outlier due to a relationship between value/price difficult to interpret in the light of the consolidated analysis tools.