Opinion

Carpark Conundrum

For anyone hoping to run a business in Macau that requires some amount of easy mobility, be it for clients or for goods, a car is essential. But with this comes the drama of finding places to park. Macau is fast following its other city cousins, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York – there’s no room at the inn!

When it comes to the business of parking in this town, be it on the peninsula, in Taipa or indeed even in Coloane, we locals with cars or motorbikes simply shrug our shoulders, raise our eyes to the Heavens and sigh deeply.

Finding parking, especially on week days, is not for the faint hearted … gone are those lovely relaxed times in old Macau when we could be confident in coming to town and easily finding a road side bay. These days it’s more like taking part in an assault course, jostling, honking, and endless queuing. It's no exaggeration – at quarter to nine on any week day its simply impossible to get your car parked promptly.

With no sign of additional town centre carparking coming on line in the near future, what is one to do? For those of us who need to get in and out of parking several times a day, and to have peace of mind to be able to do so with ease, the obvious options are to rent … or to buy.

Rent of course varies depending on location, floor level, and whether the actual bay is easy to park in – but between HK$1800 to HK$3,500 per month, seems to be the norm, IF you can get one. In central Macau you may have to join a waiting list, or enter a ‘lucky draw’ and pray your name gets picked!

But rather than throwing this money down the drain in rent, another option, offering substantial capital gains opportunity, is to buy. Macau has witnessed tremendous increases in carpark prices over the past five years. One carpark in China Plaza in the central business district – on the fifth floor down – sold for HK$350,000 in 2007, then HK$930,000 a year ago, and recently for HK$2.1million. Others have seen increases from HK$850,000 last year to HK$1.7million this year. Now that’s good business in anybody’s book!

And it's not just parking for work; equally challenging is parking at home. Even residents of the Edificio On Son public housing complex at Seac Pai Van were horrified to find that their parking bays cost at least HK$680,000, outweighing the HK$650,000 for their 1 room apartments.

So there you have it … to rent or to buy? Or continue doing battle for that elusive rectangular piece of concrete.

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