Airport Parking Pension Investments - Is Selling Airport Parking Spaces a Scam?

Is Airport Parking Suitable for Pension Investment? Is Airport Parking Safe and Guaranteed?

Airport parking spaces being offered as an investment opportunity appear to be following the same pattern as those offered previously for Storage Pods which interestingly now seem to have gone very quiet. It's really very worrying that such schemes are being so actively marketed to people with the new pension freedoms and who could end up losing their entire pension pot to these unregulated investment "opportunities".

With any investment or purchase especially an unregulated one I always find it a useful consideration to assess what the seller is getting from the deal as well as what I would get. If the seller is getting a risk free return substantially above mine and my entire capital is at risk, as it is with any unregulated investment regardless of any so called guarantees offered, then it will always ring alarm bells.

Two examples are storage pods and airport parking spaces. If I can buy a building and subdivide it into a series of storage pods or buy a plot of land and divide it into parking spaces and sell them on for a massive profit, I could be making millions from it. The poor unsuspecting punter who has bought a parking space or storage pod now has a piece of land they have bought at a massively inflated price and no easy way to sell or realise their money other than finding another sucker to buy it off them.

Why would anyone buy a secondhand one when Parking First claim they immediately market it for 25% increase on the purchase price? If I really want a parking space then I'd buy one directly saving myself 25%.

The details on the Parking First airport parking at Glasgow give some shocking numbers. The site contains 1033 parking spaces. Parking first claim that these are worth £30,000 each. That's a total of almost £31 million. But if the land isn't viable as parking and can't be rented out hen it's only worth the land value, maybe £1 million if you're lucky. So Parking First have made £30 million profit and the people buying parking spaces have lost £30 million between them.

Similar numbers worked for the Storage First pods that they offered previously. An old warehouse once divided into pods suddenly was worth £6 million.

Anyone who has bought these pods is having great difficulty selling them and cannot realise the money from their "investment".

Remember any UNREGULATED investment does not have to meet any standards of accuracy, truthfullness or consumer protection that a regulated investment would. You have no protection under FSCS and can lose 100% or your entire investment. If you can afford to lose your pension pot then this might be the investment for you.

For anyone else you are probably far better to use a fully FSCS protected, FCA regulated investment portfolio where you really are guaranteed that you will not be subject to fraud.