He now owns 150 garages and 300 car parking spaces across the country, including in Essex, the Midlands, Nottingham, London and the South East.
“We rent to people who live in blocks of flats; we will approach them and see if they want to rent them out. For the car parking spaces, they might have an extra car or just want an extra space.
The business has proved lucrative, and Mr Taupe makes around £20,000 a month income from his garages and parking spaces.
“If the roof is leaking, you make the decision whether to mend it but, in general, when someone signs the lease, they agree to maintain it and to give it back in the condition they rented it in.”
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“Usually, garages are bought for between £10,000 to £30,000 in a ‘normal’ location but a garage in Mayfair might be £200,000 to £300,000, almost as much as a London flat.
Mr Taupe lets his garages out on 12-month leases and the yields are significantly more than buy-to-lets, ranging from 5 to 15 per cent, according to EIG property auctions.
“Garages offer a great alternative to storage costs for tradesmen, so they’ll perform well in densely populated residential areas, especially where houses are rows of Victorian houses [and] where parking on the street is tricky due to a lack of driveways, so demand will outstrip supply.”
“We’re definitely seeing a shift of residential landlords into non-residential assets, so this would include commercial, industrial, garages and other similar asset classes,” says Mr Collar-Brown.
“Arguably, the council are no longer building garages either, so the fact that they are not building more suggests, long term, there will be some capital appreciation too.”
“It’s hard to buy garages as they don’t come up very often and people are realising that they are good investments,” says Mr Taupe, who uses his network of contacts, which includes estate agents and surveyors, to find out when they are coming up for sale. He also buys at auction.
Another downside is that you have to check that people are not storing things in their garage that they shouldn’t, for example, flammable materials, and “if a tenant fills a garage with rubbish and then refuses to pay their rent, you have to pay for it to be cleared out”, adds Mr Taupe.
It is harder to get banks to lend on garages compared to buy-to-lets but Mr Collar-Brown says there are ways.
While letting out garages is a niche area, Mr Taupe says there is money to be made. “If could get hold of them, I’d definitely move into buying more.”
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