Cynthia Habberstad didn’t buy a prime parking spot at the posh Onyx Chelsea, a new 52-unit condominium in Manhattan.
That when the current price was $165,000 for the cement slab. The mother of three changed her mind a few months later only to find that all the spaces had been filled. Now the mother of three is kicking herself.
The first two parking spaces at the Chelsea sold for $165,000, the third for $175,000 and the last two for $195,000. Each space includes about $50 in monthly maintenance costs.
The demand for places in Manhattan is indicative of the situation throughout New York City, where parking fetches roughly the same price per square foot as actual living space.
According to Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants, the average parking space costs $165,019, or $1,100 per square foot, close to the median apartment price of $1,107 per square foot. A $200,000 parking space costs about $1,333 per square foot.
There is a waiting list for five private parking spaces for $225,000 in the basement of a 34-unit condominium development scheduled for completion next January.
Parking in new developments is selling for twice what it was five years ago, said Jonathan Miller, an appraiser and president of Miller Samuel.
Although spaces in the main sections of Manhattan are the most expensive, even those on open lots and garages in Brooklyn, Queens, Riverdale and Harlem are going for close to $50,000, though at least one new Brooklyn development is asking $125,000.
In other densely populated cities where space and parking are at a premium, condominium parking spaces also tend to sell for high prices. In Boston, they can sell for up to $175,000, and they go for up to $75,000 in Chicago. In other cities, like Los Angeles and Dallas, most condos include parking in their prices.
With lenders offering six-figure mortgage financing for a parking space and demand on the rise, there is an exciting niche growing for chain title searches on individual spaces.
Bobbi Shorthouse of Notary Services LLC in Connecticut offers some tips on conducting a title search on a parking space. She suggests getting a copy of the map and going around the wanted space. A situation may arise where the parking spaces on the map do not match the space numbers and are not being used by the correct owners.
“For many, many years and transfers, the owners didn’t like where their spaces were, so they ‘traded’ them and renumbered them to suit what the four ‘owners’ wanted,” Shorthouse said. “All the owners were happy with the space they were using; the spaces were the same cost, and our buyers wanted the space the sellers were using, not their own.
She said the group involved did not want expensive legal fees to correct something they did not feel needed “correction”.
“We protected ourselves by making sure we had records of the deeded space and that the buyers knew that the space they were parked in was not the deeded space and the space that was transferred to them,” Shorthouse said. “The extractor gave us everything we needed to know on paper exactly what was what and where, which allowed us to discover by talking to the real estate agent and the buyers the discrepancy in the location of the space according to the recorded map. Without that map and asking about the location of the space and the “number” in the parking space, we never would have known.”