Pricey parking: Warehouses for wealthy car collectors emerge as new niche in storage

Car collectors and wealth-management professionals say wealthy people increasingly acquire rare vehicles rather than art and wine collections

A 1971 Plymouth Barracuda (Credit: Ullstein Bild | Getty Images)
A 1971 Plymouth Barracuda (Credit: Ullstein Bild | Getty Images)

Collectors of vintage cars face a bigger storage challenge than owners of wine and art collections.

That’s why car warehouses are opening across the country with parking for 100 or more collector’s items, from classic Porsches to Plymouth Barracudas, according to wealth-management advisers and and car collectors.

For example, hedge fund partner Henry Robertelli of Axius Holdings is building out a 7,000-square-foot space for car storage inside a warehouse in suburban Atlanta that spans almost 35,000 square feet. “There’s a demand for it,” Robertelli told Bloomberg.

Matt Farrah, a Los Angeles-based media entrepreneur, is building a 13,800-square-foot garage in west Los Angeles with storage space for as many as 140 cars. Farrah told Bloomberg that he has 85 people on a waiting list who are prepared to pay a monthly fee of as much as $1,500 per parking space when the garage opens in the summer of 2019.

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Farah – whose personal car collection includes a Mercedes SL 500, a Porsche 911 and a Lamborghini – expects to invest $10 million to develop his LA car-storage facility. He also plans to open car warehouses in other markets “with a lot of money and no parking,” Bloomberg reported.

Wealthy collectors have turned their attention toward cars and away from art and wine in recent years, and most of them want car storage that is remote from their residences, according to Timothy Sheehan, a senior director of BNY Mellon Wealth Management in Atlanta.

In South Florida, developers Louis Birdman and Jay Massirman have built a condominium for storing cars, called AutoHouse. They priced storage units at the property in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood from $350,000 to $1.5 million.

Popular collectible cars include vintage Mercedes and Ferraris and new limited-edition cars such as the Porsche Turbo S Exclusive as well as Chevy Chevelles, Plymouth Barracudas and other muscle cars manufactured in the 1960s. Restored Volkswagen buses also are popular among collectors. [Bloomberg] Mike Seemuth