And With a Roof, They’d Cost Even More

Two Boston Parking Spots Sell for $560,000 at Auction

Michael Dwyer/Associated Press

Bidding for the two front-and-back spaces behind 298 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston started at $42,000.

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Published: June 14, 2013

BOSTON — If you thought housing prices were spiraling up again, consider the lowly parking space.

A slab of asphalt, a couple of white lines, it often comes as part and parcel of a home purchase without too much thought. But in cities like Boston, parking spaces are at a premium, and prices have been climbing for years. In certain neighborhoods, the price of a home can go up $100,000 or $200,000 if parking is included, which it often is not, only adding pressure to the supply and demand crunch that drives prices up further.

Jaws dropped in 2009 when someone paid $300,000 for a parking space, which was thought to be a record.

But now, even that has been shattered. At an auction on Thursday, the bidding for a tandem spot — space for two cars, one behind the other — started out at $42,000. It ended 15 minutes later at $560,000.

The spaces are behind 298 Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay, one of the costliest neighborhoods in the city.

“What we’ve seen is the meteoric rise of these prices as the professional class has moved into town,” said Steven Cohen, a Boston-based principal and broker at Keller Williams Realty International. “The Back Bay is almost on a par with Lower Manhattan and Switzerland.”

The winning bidder, Lisa Blumenthal, lives next door in a multimillion-dollar single-family home that already has three parking spots. She told The Boston Globe that the auction was a rare chance to acquire more parking for guests and workers, though she did not expect the bidding to run so high.

“It was a little more heated than I thought it would have been,” she said.

The auction was held in the back alley where the spaces are situated. It was conducted, in the rain, by the Internal Revenue Service, which had seized the spaces from a man who owed nearly $600,000 in back taxes. In 1993, The Globe said, the man bought them for $50,000.

Mr. Cohen, the broker, said he would have expected the spaces to go for about $300,000 — not top dollar, because the first car has to be moved out to move the second.

Still, he said, in high-value markets, parking prices are driven by supply and demand and wealthy people will pay extraordinary prices for a nearby spot, for the convenience.

“It’s hard for most of us to get our brains around this,” he said. “But this is a portal into the world of people who are playing by different rules than most of us. Boston is a Brahmin place where reason doesn’t go out the door so easily. So when it does, it fascinates us.”

A version of this article appeared in print on June 15, 2013, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: And With a Roof, They’d Cost Even More.