Need a place to park your collector car? GaragePointer might help

It’s a common lament: You’ve just bought another collector vehicle but have no place to store it. Or maybe you’re taking one of your classics to Monterey in August and you need a secure place to keep it when not cruising around the peninsula. The partners behind GaragePointer, a newly launched part of the “sharing” economy, think they have a solution.

There are seven partners in the endeavor, led by well-known classic car appraiser Donald Osborne.

“One of the biggest demographic trends of the last 10 years is the movement of people back to cities, but one of the greatest challenges of an urban lifestyle is parking,” Osborne said in a news release.

“Finding safe, convenient and reasonably priced parking is problematic, particularly for people who own high-end luxury cars and collectible automobiles. We created GaragePointer to address the needs of these people, for collectors who have simply run out of space in their own garages, for boat owners and anyone else looking for convenient storage.”

“All of us who are car people have always realized one of the big barriers to owning a collector car is a place to safely store it when you’re not using it,” one of Osborne’s partners told Classic Car News. “It might be that for our typical client, this might be his or her second collector car (and thus no room in his or her home garage).”

And there’s a flip side. There are people of a certain age who may no longer be driving, or who may have only one vehicle in a two-car or larger garage and who could use the monthly income from renting out that empty space. The same might be true of millennials who are becoming home (or condo) owners but who don’t own multiple or in some cases even a single car, preferring to rely on public transit or the sharing economy for their personal transportation needs.

The GaragePointer website is similar to other sharing-economy sites. People with space sign up and display what they can offer and people who need a place for their vehicle(s) sign up to see what’s available. Prices are set by the person with the space to rent; GaragePointer will get a connection fee when a garage is rented.

“Vehicle-owners get to garage their cars close to where they live (or where they be traveling), and garage-owners get to unlock an income stream from unused space,” Osborne said.

“Classic car owners who wouldn’t qualify for (insurance) coverage without a garage can also now insure their vehicles at vastly lower agreed-value classic car rates, keeping them safe and off the street,” the GaragePointer news release noted.

For more information, visit the GaragePointer website.