Yard or Carpark - What's the difference?

With city and city fringe areas, car parks have historically been charged for. And recently this pattern has been extended further into industrial areas where tenants have had an expectation that car parks would be included as part of a lease deal.

Now, in addition to this, we are experiencing a trend of even small amounts of yard space being charged for. Which therefore begs the question – What is yard, and what is car-parking, and how can each of them be used?

The distinction has generally not been one that has needed to be documented. But we believe in the future it will be. Because often car parks are used for a variety of uses other than car-parking – which then causes congestion elsewhere – especially in multi-tenanted developments. We have seen car-parks used for long term container storage, surplus machinery storage, and even for manufacturing and processing.

With the increasing shortage of properties offering anything more than minimal yard space, we would expect to see more tenants trying to use car-parks as yard. Which means  that increasingly there will be a case for writing into leases an acknowledgement  that car parks can only be used for that singular purpose.