June 15, 2013 ?? – While recent parking tickets costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in Boston and San Francisco shocked readers this week, the volatile price of parking, especially residential parking, reflects the “volatile” world of urban real estate, according to real estate experts. .
The Internal Revenue Service auctioned off two residential parking spaces in Boston on Thursday for $ 560,000, and an 8-by-12-foot parking space in San Francisco’s trendy South Beach neighborhood sold for 82,000. $ the week before, as the San Francisco Chronicle first reported.
“When we look at residential versus commercial parking, the overall trends are similar. But with residential parking, it’s specific to that individual block, and it’s much more variable,” said James Cook, US Director from research to real estate. Colliers International service company. “It’s also more volatile.”
It was obvious Thursday in Boston, when crowds of people gathered in the rain in the upscale Back Bay neighborhood. The IRS auctioned off two parking spaces it had seized from a man with nearly $ 600,000 in back taxes. He bought the spaces for $ 50,000 in 1993, the Boston Globe reported. Auctions started at $ 42,000.
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At first glance, the two parking spots can’t seem to fetch half a million dollars. They are located in what looks like an alley, behind two more parking spaces. But those two parking spots are behind Commonwealth Avenue, where a street spot sold for over $ 300,000 in 2009.
The winner, Lisa Blumenthal, already has three parking spots with her home on Commonwealth Avenue, a few blocks from the finish line of the Boston Marathon. But she told the Boston Globe that more space would allow guests and workers to park.
Blumenthal declined to comment on ABC News.
“It was a little hotter than I expected,” Blumenthal told The Globe.
Unlike Blumenthal’s new property, the Townsend Street parking spot in San Francisco that sold for $ 82,000 is in a gated parking lot attached to a condominium near the AT&T San Francisco Giant baseball stadium.
When Cook saw the headlines about parking prices, he was shocked at first, and then when he found out where the parking spaces were, they “made more sense.”
“It’s a really simple economy – the laws of supply and demand. In the United States, the world of parking, like all real estate, is a tale of two worlds.”
The two worlds Cook, who lives in rural Indiana, refers to are the major urban areas of the country, “then the rest of the United States.”
“There is no shortage of parking spaces in the rest of the nation,” Cook said. “In Indiana, I never pay for parking. It’s all about supply and demand.”
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“The Back Bay neighborhood is super rich, hip, expensive and one of the hardest places to find a parking space in North America,” he said.
Cook said leasing the parking space would provide a potentially stable source of income for the new owner, or that she could always resell the space.
“Either way, she’ll get the value if she sells it. There’s no loss of money for her,” said Cook, who added that wealthy homeowners in the area could most likely afford the places. .
The median home value for Back Bay in Boston, according to the Zillow Home Value Index, is $ 736,300, up 17.8% year-over-year and 2.3% from March to April 2013.
In South Beach in San Francisco, it stands at $ 931,200, up 27.8% year-over-year and 1% month-over-month from March to April.
“These are the coolest, trendiest places to live. The general trend is that leading US urban markets have led the real estate recovery. There has been a real bifurcation,” he said.
Retail real estate sales and rental prices in New York and San Francisco are “astronomical,” Cook said.
“You would think there has never been a recession. In the rest of the United States, there is an ongoing recovery,” he said.
Colliers International published a list of the most expensive central business districts for parking in October. They studied dozens of shopping areas and found that New York, Boston, and San Francisco topped the median rates for unreserved monthly parking spots. In other words, they are non-designated parking spaces such as parking garages without specific and designated locations.
Here is the Necklaces list of the 17 best US cities according to median monthly rates:
1. New York, NY – Midtown: $ 562
2. New York, NY – Downtown $ 533
3. Boston, Massachusetts: $ 405
4. San Francisco, California: $ 375
5. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: $ 313.25
6. Chicago, Illinois: $ 289
7. Seattle, Washington: $ 285
8. Washington, DC $ 270
9. Honolulu, Hawaii: $ 230
10. Los Angeles, California: $ 220.93
11. Oakland, California: $ 195
12. Bellevue, Washington: $ 195
13. Hartford, Connecticut: $ 189.74
14. Portland, Oregon: $ 185
15. Denver, Colorado: $ 180
16. San Diego, California: $ 175
17. Minneapolis, Minnesota: $ 175
