Affluent Gearheads Are Purchasing Upscale Parking Lofts as Gathering Spots

A Growing Niche

These developments use the same basic idea: collectors with high-value cars want a place to store them that also feels like a club. The Hangar Group and The Stacks are built around private units and social spaces, while Dezer's Porsche Design Tower puts the car inside the residence. In each case, the garage is no longer just a garage.

A Clubhouse for Vehicles

Scott Cunningham loves Ferraris. His collection also includes Porsches, superbikes, electric guitars, and wine. He long kept all of it at home.

After his children moved out, he and his wife sold their family house, which had a four-car garage, and settled into a townhouse with one and a half garage spaces. He suddenly had multiple track cars, sports cars, and motorcycles with no place to go.

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He first tried ordinary business parks, but the setting was wrong. "Right across from me, a guy was running a produce business, and he had a pallet of rotten tomatoes that was leaking tomato juice out onto the street right across from a guy with a Mercedes collection," Cunningham told Business Insider. "And I thought, that doesn't work."

Enthusiasts with seven-figure car collections want their vehicles to be seen and shared, Cunningham said. "These guys run out of space before they run out of money." A friend who is a pilot invited him into a private hangar outfitted with a TV, a bar, and memorabilia, and it sparked the idea for his own version.

He opened The Hangar Group in 2019. His Palm Beach, Florida project ultimately sold out, with spaces of 1,100 to 4,500 square feet priced at roughly $800 per square foot. He now operates two South Florida locations, and the next project is in the Hamptons.

Parking Near Las Vegas

Rusty Brown is developing The Stacks, a 29-unit auto-loft complex in Henderson, Nevada, roughly a 20-minute drive from Las Vegas. The opening is planned for August, and several units have already been sold.

Brown thinks many buyers could afford a bigger house, but they prefer to move their prized possessions out of family spaces. "Any kind of collectible, if it gets away from them, can take over the entire house," Brown told Business Insider. "And sometimes that doesn't go over well with the spouse."

Cars in the Living Room

Gil Dezer, president of Dezer Development, sees it differently. Dezer's 60-floor tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, branded by Porsche Design, uses the patented Dezervator, a car elevator that carries vehicles into residents' living rooms for guests to see. He worries that off-site storage causes collectors to lose interest. "If you put cars in another garage, the first month you're visiting them every week, then it's every other week, and then it becomes once a month, and then before you know it, you're never there anymore," Dezer told Business Insider. "It's a lot easier to collect stamps than to collect cars."

Cunningham and Brown say their developments are also about community. "We've incorporated and really built into the fabric of the brand a social aspect," Cunningham said. "Owners aren't going somewhere where they're going to run into somebody who is going to pester them for their business card or ask them to do anything like that. They're around peers, but they're not trying to impress each other; they're just enjoying being able to socialize and meet people they wouldn't have met."

As the idea expands beyond Florida, with The Hangar Group heading to the Hamptons and The Stacks Auto Lofts set to open this summer, the car-condo market is giving wealthy collectors another way to protect and display the things they love. For owners who run out of room at home, a private garage the size of an apartment has become a place to gather as much as a place to park.

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