When Parking Is Mentioned, Home Buyers Pay a Premium

• January 10, 2014
• 4 Comments

by Lark Turner

Buyers take note: When a listing mentions parking, you’re probably going to pay a heft premium for it, a recent study concluded.

Homes for sale in the DC area that mentioned parking commanded a 28.4 percent higher premium than those that didn’t, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, using data from Zillow. The median price of DC-area listings promoting a home’s parking spot was $475,000, compared with $370,000 on homes that didn’t. (The average price for a parking space in DC has been pegged at somewhere in the $25,000 to $40,000 range.) The study used data from the second quarter of 2013, when 28 percent of DC area listings mentioned that the home included space for a car.

Though the DC area had a smaller percentage of parking-promoted homes than many of the other metro areas mentioned, the price difference was much more notable in the region. The only metro area with a higher premium was Baltimore, where listings were priced an average of 60 percent higher if they mentioned parking.

Funnily enough, some metro areas, like Minneapolis-St. Paul, showed the opposite effect: listings that mentioned a parking spot were actually listed at a 4 percent discount. A real estate agent told the WSJ that parking isn’t considered much of an amenity there; it’s more like an expectation.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/when_parking_is_in_the_listing_buyers_pay_a_premium/7983

4 Comments

1. James said at 2:28 pm on Saturday January 11, 2014:
   Doubt it--on our Hill street we all have parking in the rear but park in front of our houses, on the street, instead. Parking spots in the rear are either empty or rented to commuters.

1. jag said at 5:30 am on Sunday January 12, 2014:
   "Homes for sale in the DC area that mentioned parking commanded a 28.4 percent higher premium than those that didn’t" The common sense explanation is that parking itself doesn't account for the difference in value. The difference is that only listings in expensive, dense areas (where parking demand outstrips supply, e.g. dupont, logan, etc.) will bother mentioning parking. Whereas listings in cheaper, more residential areas (e.g. NE) don't get value out of mentioning the obvious fact that there's available parking.

1. James said at 3:01 am on Monday January 13, 2014:
   @ jag Sorry--yours is the wrong answer to the wrong question (and factually incorrect).

1. ABD said at 8:55 pm on Monday January 13, 2014:
   Did the study provide any data on how much longer the listings WITHOUT parking sit on the market versus listings that do include parking? That's definitely an important driver on the pricing; it's harder to resell a unit in dense areas of DC when it doesn't have a parking space. Also, I have to agree with 'jag' that the dataset doesn't sound very reliable. "Listings that mentioned parking" is not the same as listings that definitely have parking.