London Drivers are Paying £800-A-Month to Rent Car Space
Londoners are splashing out as much as £780 a month on a parking space in the capital – more than it costs to rent a three-bed house in the north of the country. To actually buy a space motorists may have to pay as much as £250,000 as prices rise to record levels in the capital and a generation fear they have been locked out of the city’s housing market.
The capital is the priciest place for first-time buyers, with average asking prices for starter homes nearly 30 per cent more than the second highest, St Albans. It is now estimated that Britons will need to save up for 15 years before they can afford to get on the housing ladder.
But London’s high-rollers are not holding back as they park flash cars across the city. The most expensive borough to rent a space in Kensington and Chelsea, where punters rent spaces in a secure carpark opposite Harrods for nearly £800 a month.
At £9,360 a year with an added £900 deposit, all applicants must also live within 400 metres of the prime spots to get hold of the 10.5 square metre area. This is despite many luxury cars being longer than the pricy parking space, which is advertised by Harrods Estates. Just 4.2m long, a Lamborghini Aventador, at 4.9m, Bentley Flying Spur, at 5.3m, Range Rover, at 5m and even a BMW 5 series, at 5m, will be sticking out by as much as a full metre.
Elsewhere in the capital, in Hammersmith and Fulham, West London, a single space outside a house is fetching as much as £585 a month. And in upmarket Camden, North West London, a National Trust property – Fenton House – is offering spaces within their grounds for £600 a month.
The ex-Merchant’s house – which was bequeathed to the charity in 1952 – is flogging four spots in walking distance of Hampstead tube station. The advert claims they: ‘would suit perfectly for a neighbouring business with parking needs for the staff or local residents in need of safe and secure parking.’
For permanent spaces, wealthy city-slickers fork out as much as £250,000 for a spot in the City of Westminster – close to the Houses of Parliament. Close to Harrods, the extra-large secure plots have 24-hour security and CCTV – with supercars and plush SUVs pictured in their advert.
A double garage space can fetch a stunning £750,000, while, in nearby Kensington, you can rent a four-car garage for £6,500 a month. A second spot is available to buy in a small garage close to Hammersmith tube station for £200,000.
In Kensington, a small space in a private car park can fetch £190,000. While ridiculous spots – where cars are pictured barely squeezing into allocated spaces – still fetch as much as £70,000. London was revealed as the hardest place for youngsters to get on the property ladder in a survey earlier this week.
The property website Rightmove looked at average asking prices for typical first-time buyer homes with a maximum of two bedrooms in 60 major urban locations. The research made several assumptions, including that first-time buyers had a 10 per cent deposit and would be paying back their mortgage over 25 years.
Within the capital, the average monthly mortgage payment for a first-time buyer was put at £2,533. Meanwhile, the average asking price for a typical first-time-buyer property in the cheapest city – Bradford – is £104,643, which could lead to monthly mortgage payments of about £521.
And even the second most expensive city, St Albans, had average monthly mortgage payments calculated at £1,958 – nearly £600 less than in London Alarming figures revealed in January lay bare the scale of Britain’s looming mortgage crunch, amid fears that a generation will be locked out of the housing market and those living in London will need to save for more than 15 years to get on the ladder.
It found that the typical first-time buyer now spends almost two-fifths of their income on their mortgage, close to levels last seen at the start of the financial crisis. New homeowner typically puts 39 per cent of their monthly earnings towards their mortgage payments, up from an average of 29 per cent in the last decade.
The last time home loan payments made up such a large chunk of household budgets was in 2007 when mortgage spending typically made up 45 per cent of income. London has the greatest gap between the most and least affordable local authorities in the country, the report by the Nationwide Building Society found. The borough of Westminster is the least affordable authority relative to earnings in the UK, Nationwide found, where the typical first-time buyer home costs 15.6 times the average income in the area.
