Nick Scamuffa sells $150 parking spots in Newtown Square Pa
Nick Scamuffa closed his Newtown Square hair salon through the weekend and turned the lot into a parking business. In newtown square pa, the PGA Championship crowd at Aronimink Golf Club has made that the kind of calculation that gets done in real time.
Scamuffa is charging between $150 and $200 a day, and he said he could fit as many as 100 cars. He had about 100 total reservations on the books earlier this week, a quick sell-through for a side business built around one tournament week.
The PGA Championship is at Aronimink Golf Club this week for the first time in 64 years, and street parking around the course is prohibited. Spectators cannot park on-site, so the tournament has pushed them toward prepaid off-site lots, where spaces cost $40 or more and come with a 10-minute shuttle ride.
Nick Scamuffa’s salon lot
Scamuffa said patrons can walk from his salon through a neighborhood to the nearest course entrance in less than 10 minutes. That walking distance gives his lot a premium over the official option, where parking passes appeared sold out on the primary market by Wednesday and resellers were asking $400 to $800 per spot.
“I would be my customer,” Scamuffa said, when asked how he would feel looking for parking as a spectator. “We can’t just be closed,” he said of shutting his salon while the tournament is in town.
He tied the whole idea to demand that far outstrips supply. “I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re expecting 200,000 people [at the tournament], I just need a few hundred of them to park,” he said. At his prices, a full lot could bring in $20,000 a day.
Lexi Dahlin’s lawn spots
Lexi Dahlin is renting out nine spots on her lawn and a few more in her driveway about half a mile from the course. She is charging between $100 and $150 a day, and she said, “If there is an opportunity to make money, why not?”
Local homeowners were selling parking spots for sometimes $150 or more during later rounds over the weekend. That has turned a quiet neighborhood asset into a temporary market, with residents and business owners taking advantage of the same shortage from different blocks away.
Aronimink’s parking squeeze
The PGA told fans to take SEPTA Regional Rail to the Paoli station and then ride a 12-minute shuttle to the course. That route sits alongside the official prepaid lots, but the sold-out primary market and the $400 to $800 reseller prices leave a narrower path for spectators who want to get close without paying outsize secondary-market rates.
Newtown Square’s average household income is $135,000 a year, and Zillow puts the average home value around $800,000. Those numbers help explain why a one-week parking trade has found traction here: the tournament has created a temporary cash market in a place where the real estate is already expensive, and the people with space are moving fast to sell it.
