How to Make Money Renting Out Your Driveway
There is no such thing as a free lunch, and when it comes to parking in the city, that is certainly the case. Cities across the country, short on space and high on the need to raise revenue, have been increasing the cost to park your car on public streets. Private parking is even worse.
But with parking space at a premium in cities, is there any way for you to benefit from it?
Perhaps… profit from renting your driveway?
Why Rent Your Driveway?
In 2007, the New York Times ran a story about eight people who were competing to buy a parking space in a Manhattan condo development for $225,000.
Since then, and as you likely know, prices have gone up exponentially. Now, according to CNBC, the price for a parking spot at 520 West 28th Street was $450,000 in 2022.
And sure, for those of you who live nowhere near New York City, you may be wondering, “Who could even pay for that?!”
Well, there’s certainly someone. These spots are not only on the market for exorbitant prices, but selling for them, too.
One of those parking spots is easily equivalent in price to a single house in Piscataway, New Jersey. Piscataway was chosen simply because it’s a suburb within a reasonable drive from New York City. Feel free to check it out yourself on any of your favorite home-browsing services.
And while you might not own parking spot worth half a million, you may still have an opportunity to rent your driveway make money by renting your driveway.
How to Rent Your Driveway
Outrageous parking fees lead drivers to look for parking elsewhere. Luckily for you homeowners, that elsewhere could be that extra space in your driveway.
Here’s how to rent your driveway.
1. Have a Driveway
That’s right, your extra driveway space can help make you some extra cash. Websites like Neighbor and ParkingForMe are among the largest online parking marketplaces. They provide users with a place to list and rent out their available driveway space.
On both websites, you can look at a map and see how much money spots are currently renting for before you sign up. That works well for you if you’re just curious about renting out your driveway, and not looking to sign up.
To compare as accurately as possible, we took a quick look at what New York City currently has available in terms of parking spots. One of the spots is going for $600,000!
However, there are plenty of spots available at much more reasonable prices — from dozens of dollars to hundreds of dollars.
Getting started is easy for most of these sites and apps. In fact, it doesn’t take long at all to register. However, there may be a wait for getting your booking opportunity up and running, since someone may have to manually review your driveway posting before it goes live.
But within a reasonable timeframe, you could be renting your driveway. (But you shouldn’t expect half a million that those Manhattanites are paying.)
2. Choose Your Marketplace
There are multiple apps and websites available for renting your driveway out.
Here’s a look at a few options and their features.
Neighbor
Neighbor boasts that the average host makes about $300 a month renting their driveway. Based on the map full of hundreds of thousands of dollars parking spots, you can set your price to whatever you’d like. You can also sign up in five minutes or less.
With Neighbor, you can rent out more than your driveway. Other spaces you can rent out on Neighbor include garages, basements, businesses, and more. Payments are digital, via Stripe so you won’t be having to handle any money.
ParkingForMe
On ParkingForMe, you can easily see and set hourly, daily, weekly and monthly rates. As opposed to Neighbor and Spacer, the terms of payment and acceptance are your responsibility. So ParkingForMe does not handle it.
And unlike Neighbor, ParkingForMe is only for renting parking spots. It also boasts a comprehensive FAQ, which is nice. There are, however significantly fewer listings than Neighbor.
ParkOnMyDrive
ParkonMyDrive is available only in the US, UK, Ireland and Australia, but the website’s style is a little outdated. There is by far significantly less volume than ParkingForMe. For instance, no parking spots were found in New York City or San Francisco. Only one spot was found in Dublin, Ireland. You also must pay a yearly fee to place your listing, which other sites do not charge.
Spacer
On Spacer, you can only rent parking spaces. Their maximum price per month is $1,000 and their minimum price per month is $50.
It does appear to have more options than ParkingForMe, but fewer than Neighbor. And lastly, payment is digital, via Stripe, just like Neighbor.
Curbflip
Curbflip boasts that you can sign up in a minute and set your rates easily. Like most other sites on this list besides Neighbor, Curbflip is solely for parking spaces. But you are able to offer spaces for motorcycles, bikes, RVs, boats and more.
Curbflip also handles payments for you and allows you to message renters on-site. Additionally, Curbflip is surprisingly worldwide. There are even parking spots available in India, Germany, UK, France, Brazil, Mexico, and, of course, the USA.
3. Decide How Long You Want to Rent: Hourly, Daily, Weekly or Monthly
Most marketplaces provide flexibility with how long you allow patrons to rent out your driveway. Whether it is hourly, daily, weekly or the typical monthly amount of time, there are options available for you wherever you turn.
Month-to-month may be the go-to option for your driveway. That way you know it will be used for the whole month and can expect consistent money for renting your driveway.
However, depending on where you live, you may be able to rent in as little an increment as hourly. This would only really work well in a place with a lot of traffic, such as New York City or San Francisco. Otherwise, nobody is dying to pay for your parking space in Remote, Oregon by the hour.
However, there is something to be said about offering a daily or weekly parking space. Renting your driveway daily or weekly is especially helpful if you live near:
- A school
- A shopping center
- A stadium
- A port
- A train station
- An airport
4. Make Your Money
The amount of money you will make for renting out your driveway depends on the marketplace you choose to list it on and your location. From the spots available, you can find listings for as low as $25 per day up to $1000 or more a month to rent out your driveway.
That’s not too shabby for something you’re not using anyway.
For example, you can rent out:
- A private driveway
- A shared driveway
- A private garage
- A shared garage
- A private car park space
- A public car park space
Whatever you have to offer is game assuming that someone needs that particular parking spot in your location. Give it a try!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
It depends! Most websites do not charge you to list your driveway rental. ParkOnMyDrive, for example, is one of the few in my research that charged you for placing a driveway rental on their site.
Usually a service fee. For example, “Neighbor takes a small 4.9% + $0.30 Processing Fee from each monthly host payout” and ParkingForMe charges the renter a 6 to 12% fee based on $ value and also 3.3% for credit card transactions.
This is definitely a question that will most likely be better suited for a zoning officer of your local municipality. For example, here is one for the zoning officer of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Since most people have a hard time wandering through the legalities of zoning laws, your local zoning officer should be your first person to discuss the legalities of renting your driveway in your zone. Renting out your driveway may be considered a commercial use for your residentially zoned area, which is often a no-go. However, given that there are a ton of other people doing it around you, such as in New York City, you may very well be safe to do so.
That depends on the marketplace you choose to make a listing. Some marketplaces don’t handle money at all, you will have to directly collect payment from the renter. Some have tools like Stripe to make it contactless and completely digital.
Again, this does depend on the marketplace you use. However, for example, Neighbor offers a $1 million host guarantee as well as payout protection.
Dennis Lynch is a civil engineer turned freelance writer with a passion for personal finance. While young, he acts as the spearhead of personal finance to just about everyone in his life, passing on his knowledge from the perspective of financial independence. You can find Dennis over at colossicus.com between his freelance ventures.
