Homes with garages tend to sell for more than those without in every major U.S. metro area. See where they’re worth the most and least.
In Chicago, homes with garages sell for an estimated 38 percent more ($46,745 for the typical home) than comparable homes without them, the biggest home price premium of any metro area in the U.S. that meets the criteria for this analysis. It’s followed by St. Louis (35.1%; $34,352) and Columbus, Ohio (24.2%; $24,154).
But in Raleigh, North Carolina, a garage is correlated with just a 2 percent premium ($3,961), the lowest of any metro, followed by Austin (3.2%; $9,522) and Los Angeles (3.5%; $25,978).
Nationwide, homes with garages sell for $23,211 more than homes without garages, which equates to a 12 percent premium. Roughly 85 percent of the homes included in this analysis have garages.
We compared the sale prices of single-family homes that sold in 2018 with a garage to comparable homes without a garage. Below, the results are reported by metro area in terms of the sale price premium, as a percentage and in dollars, attributed to the presence of a garage. The ranking below is limited to metro areas with at least 1,500 homes that met the criteria for this analysis, with at least 500 homes with a garage and 500 homes without.
Take a look at the garage premium in your area, ranked highest to lowest according to the percent premium:
“A garage equals a parking spot, and a parking spot is highly valuable. In a lot of parts of Chicago, it’s that simple,” said Lamar Austin, a Redfin agent in Chicago. “Nobody wants to spend an hour circling their block to find parking when they get home from work, but that’s often what people have to do when they don’t have a garage. A parking spot is always somewhere near the top of homebuyers’ list of priorities.”
The five metros where garages are worth the most—Chicago, St. Louis, Columbus, Oklahoma City and Cleveland—are all located in the Midwest, where winters tend to be cold and snowy. Garages aren’t as valuable in places with warmer year-round climates like Honolulu, Los Angeles and Austin.
“In the winter, finding a place to park is even more difficult because more people drive to work when it’s cold outside,” Austin continued. “And when you finally do find a parking spot at the end of the day, you usually have to shovel the snow before you can park there. If you have a garage, you may have to shovel snow from the driveway, but at least your car won’t get buried overnight.”
In Austin, a sprawling metro area where snow is very rare, garages are associated with a much lower premium. Garages are also much more common in Chicago than Austin: nearly 95 percent of homes in the Chicago metro have homes, while not even half of them in the Austin metro do.
“A lot of builders in the inner core of Austin skip garages in favor of adding more livable square space to the house,” said local Redfin agent Andrew Vallejo. “Homebuyers don’t necessarily expect to get a garage if they’re buying a home inside the city, though many people do value them, particularly in the suburbs where a two-car garage is the norm.”
Every home is different and every home seller and homebuyer have different priorities. If you’re wondering about the value of a specific garage in your area, contact a real estate agent.
Methodology
For this report, we used linear regression to model the relationship between the sale price of a single-family home and whether it has a garage for homes sold in 2018 in each U.S. metro area tracked by Redfin. To be included in this dataset, a metro area must have had at least 1,500 single-family homes that met the criteria of this analysis and at least 500 homes with a garage and 500 homes without a garage. We broke out the data by metro area and controlled for many features of the homes, including location, size of the home, number of bathrooms, month of listing, Walk ScoreⓇ, median price per square foot of homes sold in the same zip code in the previous year, drive time and transit time to its local business district, age of the home, housing density in the zip code, new construction and whether the home had a view. We determined the percent increase in the sale price correlated with purchasing a home with a garage relative to a home without a garage.
