Boston Woman Pays $560K for 2 Parking Spots

Parking is such a precious commodity in Boston that one woman was willing to pay $560,000 for two off-street spaces near her home. Lisa Blumenthal won the spots in the city's Back Bay neighborhood during an on-site IRS auction yesterday. The IRS had seized the spots from a man who owed back taxes. Blumenthal, who lives in a multimillion-dollar home near the parking spaces, tells the Boston Globe the spots will come in handy for guests and workers. The record for a single spot in Boston is $300,000.

Steep prices abound on the West Coast, too. A spot in San Francisco's trendy South Beach neighborhood sold last week for $82,000. What the unidentified buyer got for that price: an 8- by 12-foot parking space in an enclosed garage in a condominium building near the San Francisco Giants' baseball park. A Porsche SUV was spotted parked in it. The spot was only on the market two weeks, according to the real estate company that sold it; the company says it sold a parking spot in the same building at the height of the last real estate boom for $95,000.