what IS the market rate for a driveway, anyway?

[edenfalling]

I will have custody of my parents' spare car from August 4 (give or take a couple days) through mid-October, during which time I will naturally be using my own driveway. But after that, I have no use for it.

Diagonal Neighbor P has asked if she can rent it from me. I have tentatively said yes (and she is using it through the end of July gratis, because I didn't have any reasonable price estimates at the time), but I'm not sure how much to charge her. The only parking rental market information I can find for Ithaca is all Collegetown-based, and Collegetown is not remotely representative of the parking situation in the city at large. (I mean, some of those spaces go for $150 a month or more. There are some that are over $2,000 a year. It's nuts.)

I am currently thinking $25 a month (which is $300 a year) might be a reasonable starting point for negotiation. If Diagonal Neighbor P agrees, that would be awesome. I am willing to be negotiated down to $20 a month, but no further.

On the other hand, maybe I should make an opening offer of $30 a month and see what happens? Or would that come off as asking too much?

Does anyone have any advice?

Comments

[krait]

Welp. Not sure how much help I'd be, but I remember when I was looking at apartments in a downtown area, one had a (limited spaces available) parking garage for which they charged an extra $40/month; I was kind of torn over whether I'd be willing to pay that, but then ended up not living there anyway.

To me, unless the driveway was offering something "valuable" like cover for the car (to protect from sun/inclement weather/bird poop -- or maybe there's a bunch of reckless drivers in the area and street parkers are very likely to get dinged?) I don't think I'd be inclined to pay much for "slightly closer, but my car's still out in the open being subject to damage". (The apartment's free-with-your-rent parking was in a gated lot, but it wasn't covered and did have trees around/over it -- so while it was more secure from human interference, falling branches, dripping sap, bird droppings etc. were all still a risk.)

But then, I'm a single person (and thus generally only carry a single person's worth of stuff from car to door) with healthy legs, who also works almost every day (so 24-hour parking isn't common for me) and I can't see your driveway :D or guess how much the neighbour might value reduced distance + no tickets! So I guess the moral here is that free advice is worth what you pay for it. :D

[edenfalling]

Well, there's the whole "kids and their stuff" issue, and even if she gets the kids to carry all their own things, she's still buying and carrying groceries for at least three people rather than one. She also buys massive bottled-water jugs instead of trusting the municipal water supply and they are heavy to carry -- I know this because she specifically mentioned that's an issue for her; not to mention I know from other conversations that she has some back problems -- and she's the one who raised the whole "can I rent your driveway" issue in the first place, so... it's obviously worth something to her. The question is how much. :-)

It's not a covered driveway, but there are no trees directly overhead (unless you pull far enough in that you're almost at my back door, which nobody has for several years and thus that part of the gravel has greened over) so falling branches, at least, are unlikely. And I could probably do some basic driveway-shoveling in the winter, since I seem to end up doing most of the sidewalk shoveling in general.