A single parking space in Hong Kong has sold for $999,570

Developers are partly to blame. They make more building apartments than garages

HONG KONG— Spare a thought for Hong Kong’s beleaguered car owners.

The market for parking spaces is hotter than ever as a single spot in a luxury development in Kowloon’s Ho Man Tin district changed hands for a record $6 million (Hong Kong), or $999,570 (Canadian).

“It’s crazy,” said Darrin Woo, a classic car collector who shipped his 1968 Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman limo and a fiery red 1957 Fiat Abarth to California to save money on storage.

“Buy a space? No way. I could buy five cars for that much.”

The average parking space now goes for about $2.25 million, a more than sixfold increase since 2006.

That makes the city’s housing market, the world’s least affordable, look tame by comparison. Home prices increased a mere 3.4 times over the same period.

In the first half of this year, some $10.3 billion of spaces changed hands, up from $6.58 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to Midland Realty Services Ltd. Car owners in London and New York face similar problems.

In Manhattan, spaces at a luxury condo at 42 Crosby St. in Soho were advertised for $1million (U.S.), according to the New York Times.

A real estate agent who handles sales for the property declined to comment.

Hong Kong developers are partly to blame. They make more money building apartments than garages, so the ratio of parking spots to housing units has declined, said Denis Ma, head of Hong Kong research at consulting firm Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. The number of parking spaces grew just 9.5 per cent to 743,000 from 2006 through 2016, while the private car population surged 49 per cent to 536,025, according to a report by the city’s Transport Department.