More yard or more parking to maximize rental property income

[Jacob Wyatt]

Hi BP community!

My wife and I just bought a home around the Morgan Street Junction in West Seattle. It is a small, old house on a small (4k sqft) lot. It is zoned commercial and LR2. We definitely plan to develop it in the future but as for now, we plan to live in it and fix it up. I assume we will be here for 3-5 years. After we move, I think we will just rent it as a rental house (instead of selling or developing right away) unless we have decided otherwise by then. 

My question is: since the lot is tiny, we are trying to figure out the best layout for the backyard to make it more valuable to renters. Currently, there is a single car garage on the south side of the property, a parking spot just north of that, then a garden just north of the parking spot. Those three items currently take up the vast majority of the back yard and since the wife and I have a little one, we are contemplating taking out the parking spot north of the shed and fencing the whole back yard in and build some nice garden beds. The single car garage is only 18.5 feet on the inside so most small SUVs and cars will fit but full size pickups will not. I am curious out of your experiences, would you recommend keeping both a garage and a parking space? Or do you find in areas like West Seattle that a slightly larger backyard would be more useful (and therefore bring in more rental income) than 2 parking spots on the premises? There is currently plenty of street parking but as more and more duplexes and town homes go up, I am sure that number will continue to dwindle. 

Any information is appreciated!

[Adrian Chu]

Some things to think about.

Is there a driveway in front of the garage?

Do you need 2 parking spaces or do you want a nice backyard?

Since you are going to be living there, let's think about that first.  

For purely rental purposes with a plan to re-develop in the future, I would not invest too much into the property.