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Don’t Buy A House - Buy A Parking Space
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Don’t Buy A House - Buy A Parking Space
Geoff Maxted
DriveWrite
August 5, 2013
According to some statistics the average price of a house in the UK is around £162,000. That ’s fine if all you want is somewhere to live but what about parking your car if there’s no space available?
The reason this is worth mentioning is because now is to time to snap up a car-sized piece of tarmac as a home for your beloved wheels. Why pay councils exorbitant sums to use their spaces? They don’t care about your car they just want the money. Far better then to invest in a chunk of automotive real estate.
There is a selection available at an agent near you. If, for example you happen to live in the vicinity of the north side of London’s Hyde Park then there’s an eleven foot by twenty foot patch of ground that could be yours (image) for just £300,000 on a 99 year lease. The space is on a narrow road behind a block of flats with bars on the windows.
This looks like being a record for a parking space to date. Previously if you were living within an opera singer’s shout of the Royal Albert Hall you could have had a similar spot for the asking price of a mere quarter of a million, although it is not known what the lucky purchaser actually paid.
This is, apparently, good news. The estate agent handling the sale of the Hyde Park property - in between rubbing his hands together and putting wads of notes into a counting machine - believes that it a sign of economic recovery. Property values are rising and it isn’t just London. Three parking spaces in St Ives, Cornwall were auctioned off last year and realised over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds for the lucky vendor.
This is going to catch on. We already have a government minister extolling the virtues of renting out a parking space on your driveway on a daily basis, and a company that encourages this sort of activity has stated that the amount that can be realised from schemes like this has risen by eight percent this year. As with properties, buy to let parking spaces could be the next big thing.
The number of vehicles on our roads has increased exponentially since the middle of the last century. They have to be parked somewhere. Councils have realised this and are cashing in. That same government minister who is getting a bit steamed up over this conveniently forgets that successive governments have actually restricted the building of car parks and supplementary parking nationally. Sadly, it is not yet possible to actually buy or sell the bit of road outside your house, so no trying to flog it to foreigners - unless you‘re about to move.
In the meantime when you are next scratching about in the bottom of your moth-infested purse or wallet for the money to pay for a few litres of petrol remember that the economy is on the up and to prove it there is a person near Hyde Park who owns his own little bit of motoring Britain.
