When Parking Is Mentioned, Home Buyers Pay a Premium

• January 10, 2014

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