Owning a Big Apple taxi is one of the fastest rides to a huge retirement nest egg.
A taxi medallion sold yesterday for a record $600,000 – making the lowly license-to-drive one of the fastest growing investments anywhere.
The seller was a Pakistani native who decided to retire from his yellow cab career after cruising city streets for 25 years.
When he started driving his first taxi in 1981, he bought his medallion for $30,000. He now can take it easy with his 20-fold gain, better than any blue chip mutual fund.
The medallion's buyer is a big fleet owner in Queens, who already owns nearly 100 medallions.
Medallions, as an investment, pay off better than fares the cabs collect, experts say.
“Medallion prices have doubled since 2003,” said Andy Murstein, president of Medallion Financial Corp., which financed the sale but didn't disclose identities of the parties.
“I've yet to find any investment that beats that, even over the past 60 years.”
The city sold its first 11,787 taxi medallions in 1937 for just $10, but froze the number of medallions for six decades.
Only in the past 10 years did the city hike the number of the coveted medallions, by holding three auctions to sell a total of 1,000.
At the last auction a year ago, a medallion fetched an average of $514,327.
Over the past six decades, medallions lavished owners with gains twice that of stocks, or 15 percent annually compared to 8 percent for stocks.
