And if you built even a conservative 5 story building, it would generate significantly more value.

Value possibly, profit not necessarily.

Put another way if building a 5 story building would be obviously more profitable then they would do that but the opportunity costs is now 1+ million per year you aren’t getting from the parking business.

Not clear. Plenty of people will forgo selling land to a developer who wants to build a five story building in order to wait for the premium that comes from the developer who wants to build a 50 story building.

The business has maybe 30 spaces at $20/day. If we assume some people use hourly rates but most use daily lets say each parking space makes $25/day for $750/day. That works out to $273,750 before expenses. To get $1 million you’d need over 100 spaces which is quite a massive plot of land for the downtown core of a city.

~115 parking spaces can fit on a normal 1-acre paved, marked parking lot. You can double that when cars park in long rows at the cost of having attendants.

You can unquestionably have smaller lots, but it’s hardly a massive plot of land.

1-acre is pretty massive for a plot of land in the downtown core of the city. It can fit an entire apartment complex. The sale value is extremely high so the $1 million in revenue isn’t that attractive given the cost of holding the land.

I mean there’s a reason we build buildings, that’s hardly in doubt. The point was simply that even seemingly undeveloped land in or near the urban core can be generating a respectable income stream and then after N years the land has also appreciated. This is especially appealing in the event of a presumably short term glut of residential and or commercial properties/zoning issues.

Also, an acre with parking attendants doubles the number of cars so they could be clearing close to 2 million before expenses, and attendants aren’t that expensive.