Damors/Flickr

If you don’t use your driveway or garage turn it into a money-spinner by renting it out. If you live in a big city or near an airport you could make as much as £17,000 a year!

• What’s the deal
• How do you do it?
• How much can you make?
• Contact Park Let or Parkatmyhouse.com to advertise your space!

What’s the deal?

Don’t ignore the possibilities of other people parking on your land, especially if you live close to a station or in a busy, urban area with little parking but lots of businesses.

If you have a garage but no car, you could potentially rent out your garage for others to park in (if there’s a demand for spaces).

You can also rent it out for other things, like letting bands use it as a rehearsal room… if you can stand thrash metal in your vicinity.

How do you do it?

You can let your garage through a property-letting agent, particularly in major cities where hiring a garage can cost the same as a small flat! For Londoners, there are also websites like London Garages that deal solely in garage rental if you want to work through an agent.

When deciding on your price, contact a few local agencies to see what they would charge for it. On finding someone, draw up a contract that covers rent, damages (loss of keys etc) and the notice period for cancelling the contract.

Renting out your driveway is even simpler. Put ads in local papers or in the local newsagent or even on your front gate. If you live near a station, see if they will let you put a notice up there. Then see how much the station car park charges per day and try to undercut them – crafty!

Even better, register with sites such as Park Let or Parkatmyhouse.com and let thousands of people know about your available space. Various websites offer you the chance to advertise your space for free but these are two of the most established sites and both offer a more comprehensive service. Compare various websites below.

Alternatively, put an ad on Gumtree but remember that you’ll have to do a lot of the legwork yourself including working out contracts and payments.

A closer look at the parking sites

Parkatmyhouse.com: It’s free to advertise your space but they do take a 15% commission on successful bookings. However, for sacrificing 15% you get professionally drafted contracts to download (six to choose from) and a completely flexible rental arrangement – you decide exactly when and for how long you rent your space for. Parkatmyhouse also offers a secure PayPal-system so that, if you prefer, you can be paid online rather than with cash or cheques.

Park Let: This is the most restrictive option as it deals only with 5 or 7 day contracts. Like Parkatmyhouse.com it charges 15% commission, and you will also be charged an additional admin fee of £25 (+ VAT) for the first month. Again, however, for this price they deal with all the contracts and processing payments and put in the extra work by negotiating with tenants on your behalf, collecting all monthly rental amounts using Direct Debit and helping out should any problems arise during the tenancy period, which makes life just that little bit easier.

Otherwise you can try YourParkingSpace and Parkonmydrive which offer a cheaper, but more basic, service. YourParkingSpace is completely free to use as the site makes it money through adverts on the site and Parkonmydrive costs only £10 per year to list each space, which is deducted once you’ve made your first booking. Despite having price on their side, however, there is little more than a calendar to help you with the actual rental process so you will need to have all the payment arrangements and any contracts drawn up yourself.

How much can you make?

Depending on where you live, you can earn from £10 a day for a driveway in a suburb to £17,000 a year for a garage in Knightsbridge, London. I know – amazing! Aside from the costs of advertising (if you’ve taken out an ad, or used one of the parking websites that charges commission), and perhaps new locks and some extra keys, there should be few costs.

How much you can earn will depend on both the location and the length of time you’re renting it out for.

Parkatmyhouse.com says that most people letting out their driveway can expect to earn around £30 a week but if you live near major public transport route or in a city centre you could make over £3,000 a year and if you only want to rent out your space every now and then and you’re near a popular sports or entertainment venue your space could be worth £10 per day!

Is it for me?

This is an easy and non-intrusive way of making some regular money.

The best about this money-maker is that you decide how flexible you want to be – if you don’t want to rent out your driveway or garage all the time, then don’t! On most of the sites there are availability calendars so you can simply select the times your space is available whether it’s half an hour here and there or a whole year!

However, you could find that having someone else’s car in your driveway causes too much noise, dirt and nuisance in the long-term. For band rehearsals, you would obviously have to have fairly distant neighbours and be able to put up with it yourself.

N.B. You will need to check with your home insurance provider to ensure that renting out your driveway or garage doesn’t affect your policy, and any extra cash you make must be declared to the Inland Revenue on your tax return. See this article for more information.

If you like the sound of renting out your driveway or garage, we think you’ll love our articles Rent a room for tax-free cash and Your home as a film set.

Start advertising your space:

• Park Let
• Parkatmyhouse.com
• London Garages (London area only)

If you liked this article we think you’d also like…

• Rent a room for tax free cash
• Make money renting during the olympics
• Make and save money from renting
• Making extra money – do I have to pay more tax?
• 10 ways to make quick cash