As the use of ride-hailing apps and automated cars expands, more builders and real estate investors are questioning if garages are a necessity.
About one in three Americans — or 35 percent of the 1,028 adults surveyed — use ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, according to data from the Toluna Research Group. And by 2025, about 8 million automated vehicles will be traversing U.S. roads without a human at the helm, according to ABI Research estimates.
Such data — paired with trends showing that more people are nixing their cars altogether — begs the question: Just how important is that garage?
The answer, according to a recent survey, is that the garage is not only still essential to most homebuyers, but that the percentage of new homes built without garages is in decline.
John Burns Real Estate Consulting conducted a survey of roughly 24,000 new-home shoppers across the U.S., and none of them said they sought a home without a garage.
“I’d say people at least want one-car space, with the majority wanting two or more,” Jenni Lantz, DesignLens manager for John Burns Real Estate Consulting, told Builder Magazine. “I don’t think we’re quite in the no-car garage space yet,” she says.
Of the 795,000 single-family homes built in 2017, 65 percent featured two-car garages, 6 percent had one-car garages and only 7 percent had no garages, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Association of Home Builders. Single-family homes built without garages hit an all-time high of 13 percent in 2010.
Another trend to be aware of is that the larger the home, the more garage spaces the homeowner wants.
About 78 percent of homes between the size of 2,000 to 2,399 square feet feature two-car garages, while roughly 15 percent of homes smaller than 1,200 square feet have two-car garages, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
Different parts of the country vary in their demand for garage space. Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and the Dakotas have the highest share of garage space with three or more car spaces. In Texas, three-car garages are more popular than two-car spaces, according to data from the National Association of Home Builders.
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