Every day there are fewer places to park in the streets of big cities, and there seems to be nothing that anybody can do about it. Traffic jams form part of daily city life and cars are getting better and better, so their owners prefer to pay for the peace of mind that a garage space can give them.

All this leads us to the following conclusion: to have a garage space is no longer a question of convenience but rather it has become a necessity of the first order. That is to say, either you park your car in a rented or bought space or you need to arm yourself with the patience needed to find a parking place on the street every time you get behind the wheel.

From the point of view of investment, the purchase of a garage space produces a higher return than that currently given by fixed deposits, variable deposits, and investment funds. Analysts say that the average return you can expect is between 5 and 10%, depending on the zone.

After a period in which cities built a huge number of garages for residents� parking, prices bottomed out in 1998, but now this investment option is beginning to look like an interesting bet again. In almost all the cities around the country, the price of a garage space is directly related to the supply of places and the number of new homes built.

We are talking about a real estate investment (with all the advantages that this implies) with a low unit cost: between 2.8 million pesetas (about 15,000 USD) in Barcelona and 1.78 million in Bilbao. On average the purchase of a garage space in the center of Madrid or Valencia could cost some 2 million pesetas (10,500 USD), as against 2.36 million in Zaragoza or 2.1 million in Seville.

It is also very cheap to maintain a garage space , and they are relatively easy to rent out too, at between 8,000 pesetas a month for a space costing 2.5 million pesetas to 25,000 pesetas for one of five million pesetas.