Price of garages soaring in car-congested cities

Parking in the Czech capital has become something of a nightmare and the price of garages in the city is soaring, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of Lidové noviny. In the past three years their value has doubled and some city residents have even started buying them as an investment.

Photo: archive of Radio Prague

A row of garages standing on their own close to a panel housing estate is a frequent sight in the suburbs of Prague. What used to be an eyesore, built in the communist years, has now become lucrative goods on the real estate market. The price of this simple construction –comprising three brick walls and a metal door – has doubled in the past three years and the cost of these unsightly garages has now risen to half a million crowns on average. The price of centrally-located garages can easily exceed one million crowns, the paper reports.

Parking in the city is becoming increasingly difficult and what with paid parking and so-called blue zones for residents garages have become hot goods. Practically every family in Prague now owns two cars and the demand for garages is enormous, Robert Hanzl, the head of the real estate Next Reality told the paper.

While in 2016 an old garage on the Prague suburbs sold for around 250,000 crowns, now people are glad to get it for half a million. In the city center garages are selling for well over a million crowns and growing demand is pushing the prices up even further.

Other big cities are having similar problems. The price of garages in the Central Bohemia region has gone up by 46 percent in the past year. In the Vysočina region, in Moravia it doubled. Garages in Brno and Plzen are now selling on average for 350,000 to 450,000 thousand crowns.

And with demand outstripping supply, many people with money to spare have started buying them as investments, a sure sign that the problems with parking are not about to go away any time soon.