Parking mad: average cost of a London car-parking space hits £219,000
Drivers in the capital pay an average of £219,000 for a spot to park their car, new research reveals. This is almost enough to buy a home in the rest of the UK, where the average house price is £230,776.
Wandsworth and Westminster also have a parking premium of over £400,000, while the cost of parking topped £100,000 in half of all boroughs, the figures from letting agent Benham and Reeves showed.
The research used Land Registry data to find the sold price of all stand-alone parking spaces bought in London last year.
It identified 176 UK areas where buying a home costs less than a London parking space, spanning the country from Aberdeenshire to Southampton.
Marc von Grundherr, director of Benham and Reeves said new developments often do not get planning permission to be built with on-site parking for all homes: “We know of one development with 300 units, no resident permits and only 20 parking spaces.”
He added that anyone investing in London property should always buy parking if available as this will add to a home’s value.
The cheapest borough to buy a parking space was Enfield, where the average price was £7,200. Redbridge (£10,417); Lewisham (£15,466); Brent (£20,500); and Hillingdon (£23,245) were the only other boroughs where a parking space cost less than £25,000.
"If you're buying a flat which is £8 million the idea of spending three per cent of that — which equates to about £250,000 — on secure parking for your expensive car in an area like Mayfair where there is very limited parking doesn't actually seem exorbitant," said Charles Cridland, technical director of parking space rental website Your Parking Space.
“Meanwhile, those looking to maximise rental income from a parking space should opt for on-street parking, which is easy to access by drivers looking to rent by the hour or day”.