5 reasons you need EV chargers for your office and workplace

December 7, 2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EV charging stations are becoming a must-have amenity for offices. We’ve highlighted five reasons why, how to make managing these chargers easy for your team and how to recoup the costs of install (if desired).

Benefits of installing EV chargers at work

When a company installs EV charging stations, they’re supporting a greener, better world. Electric vehicles don’t consume gasoline, and EVs can be powered instead by renewable energy, reducing emissions.  

Aside from a greener world, there are some great benefits to installing EV chargers for your company.

#1: Increased employee loyalty

According to MGSM, 92.1% of millennials believe working for an environmentally and socially responsible company is essential, and 83% of millennials would be more loyal to a company supporting the environment

A move as simple as installing a few EV charging solutions helps keep a company’s employees satisfied. Those who drive EVs will be reticent to consider leaving the job for one that might not have EV charging for their car. Everyone loves feeling valued, and employees whose needs are met also tend to be more engaged and productive. 

Providing essential EV charging spots for employees demonstrates a responsive and committed employer.

#2: Better company image

Social responsibility has recently become one of the key factors that ensure success. 

A study by Unilever reveals that a third of consumers (33%) are now choosing to do business with brands they believe are doing social or environmental good. Enabling greener transport will show all your clients and customers that your company means business.

EV charging at the workplace sends a clear and visible message about where the business stands in terms of reducing the environmental impact of its operations and personnel. Installing  EV charging infrastructure will allow every company to demonstrate its climate commitment and engage its stakeholders around an exciting new technology in an efficient and visible way. 

#3: Attract new employees

Employees expect that their workplace will be environmentally conscious. EV chargers are affordable, but few companies have them. Most employees will perceive it as an incredibly attractive benefit. 

“We noticed that the number of EV drivers increased after we started offering workplace charging because it enabled people to commute using their EVs...

But the biggest surprise was how it actually helped us attract and retain talent in the very competitive Bay Area job scene. It really helped us recruit good candidates and keep them happy.” – Facilities Operations Manager, Amazon Lab126

Installing EV charging proves that a company is clearly committed to sustainability. It will also ensure that your company is at the forefront of enabling staff to adopt new technologies. EV chargers can also serve as an incentive for employees to go green.

EVs are about to become the cars of our (near) future. Some states are already taking steps to support EVs and ensure a greener environment. For example, California’s governor Newsom issued an executive order requiring sales of all new passenger vehicles to be zero-emission by 2035. One in five U.S. drivers would get an EV for their next car, and EV charging at work could make this number even higher. 

#4: Attract new customers

EV charging allows a company to attract new talent, but also new customers. 

Unilever reports that 78% of U.S. consumers feel better buying sustainably produced products. According to NMI, consumers are 58% more likely to do business with a sustainable company. 

Installing EV chargers at work is likely to attract new customers to a business. Clients decide which companies they should partner with based on many factors, and convenience is one of the most important. When a potential customer arrives at your office for a big deal, they’ll usually arrive in the parking lot. 

Seeing a bank of EV chargers makes a great first impression, and shows that you take corporate responsibility and employee happiness seriously, 

#5: You can recoup the costs

Investing in EV chargers might sound expensive, as once you include installation costs, an EV charger can cost more than $10,000, and even more if the company opts for DC fast chargers.

EV charging can be a net positive for a company’s budget though, if done smartly. 

The chargers will undoubtedly improve employee satisfaction and cost less than many common benefits, such as catering or fitness centers. Also, by making your office parking spots reservable, you can charge your employees and visitors a small fee with Parkade’s help. For example, you could charge $5/day for EV parking and use Chargepoint chargers (which bill users for exactly how much electricity they consumed). Or you could use cheaper chargers, and charge $15-20/day or $3/hr for charging, and not worry about billing precision — while charging enough to net a profit on these chargers. Offices can increase charging station use by allowing public charging after business hours.

That “profit” could be used to recoup the costs of installing chargers, and pay for additional installations to be continually added.

Parkade handles the billing, payments and reservations on a mobile app, so your facilities team doesn’t need to lift a finger. 

Parkade ensures convenient management of EV charging stations at work

Adding EV chargers at work brings many benefits and a positive charging experience, as we’ve outlined. However, once the chargers are installed, companies may need to develop a strategy to manage the parking in front of the EV chargers. 

Especially at large offices with hundreds or thousands of employees, it’s smart to develop a plan to share the spots equitably among employees, and solve three potential problems that often arise with EV chargers are offices:

  • Monopolization. Once installed, you want to encourage turnover at the chargers. The company may want to ensure that more than one person each day gets to use the chargers. 
  • Unpredictable availability. Range anxiety is a real problem for EV drivers, and they’ll want — nay, need — to know if they can charge at work before leaving for the office. Making EV spots reservable in advance can solve this problem.
  • Parking without charging. One common problem with EV chargers is that companies often mark the parking spots in front of them as “EV parking only”. That can turn these into parking for EVs, whether they’re charging or not, reducing the usefulness of your chargers.

Parkade can help with all of that.

Parkade makes EV parking easy at work

Offering paid, reserved EV parking at your office is easy with Parkade

With Parkade, companies can better manage parking at EV chargers in real time, allowing more employees to charge their vehicles without necessarily requiring more chargers. Companies that have a limited number of EV chargers can allow their employees to reserve an EV parking spot in advance, for any period of time — hours, days, or months.

Parkade enables EV parking to be time-limited. 

EV owners sometimes leave their cars in EV charging spots for too long because they forget their car is charging. Parkade can help regulate the usage of these parking spots by enabling employees and visitors to reserve these spots for specific time periods (and you can charge an hourly rate for that), and then sending notifications when the time is expiring.

Also, for businesses that use Parkade to offer monthly reserved parking to employees, Parkade makes it easy for employees to reshare their EV parking spot when they’re out of the office. If one of your employees decides not to drive to work, or simply doesn’t want to charge their EV, they can share their spot with someone else, for any duration and price.

That ability to reserve long-term EV parking can give peace of mind to your EV drivers, while still maximizing charger usage when they’re not using the spot. 

Speaking of prices, a company can use Parkade to charge its employees a small fee for their charging needs. This will encourage even more sharing, and prevent employees from leaving their car in the EV charging spot longer than needed. 

The business can use all the money earned to recoup the costs of the existing chargers and keep investing in new ones. After all, EV chargers come at a high price. Residential versions cost a few hundred dollars, whereas EV chargers for commercial use are often priced at a few thousand dollars. 

Which businesses need EV charging points?

Different businesses may need to assess the requirement to install electric car charging points at their office location in different ways. For example:

  • EV charging is a must-have for businesses with an electric commercial fleet, such as a logistics company. Such businesses  require commercial electric car charging stations to accommodate large numbers of company-owned vehicles.
  • Large office complexes should ensure more smart charging points for their employees who drive Tesla's and other popular EVs to work, to increase employee satisfaction and retention.
  • A business that has company cars and is looking to go electric needs to have electric charging in place.
  • Leasing firms that offer electric vehicles must ensure those models are sufficiently charged at all times, so that they can be adequately demonstrated and tested.
  • Companies that consist of individuals driving their own electric cars – such as a taxi firm – could benefit from offering EV charging.

Installing EV chargers at work undoubtedly comes with many benefits. By offering more EV charging spots, a company can improve their image, increase employee loyalty, and also attract new customers and new talents.

However, managing limited EV parking spots can be quite challenging. Luckily, Parkade can help your company efficiently handle all those issues.

By offering reservable parking, Parkade can offer employees reliability and predictability of EV parking spots. Also, companies can charge their employees a small fee to ensure better parking utilization, prompt sharing, and recoup charger costs. What’s even better, every company can use Parkade to improve their commute culture in general, not just the usage of EV parking spots. The time has finally come to end parking madness at your workplace!

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BlogParking Management Software ROI

Investigating the ROI of parking management software

With parking being one of the largest drivers of ancillary revenue at multi-family properties, it's imperative to get it right. But just how much return can you expect from parking management software? Read on to find out.

Published: August 7, 2024
Hannah Michelle Lambert
Content Writer
Boosting ancillary revenue is often a major focus for property managers and owners alike.

Especially given that the baseline forecast for rent growth is slightly lower this year than average (2.5% versus 2.9%), properties are increasingly looking for ways to raise their bottom line without compromising the quality of living for their residents. 

One often overlooked but significant opportunity lies in parking. If managed well, it’s a potential treasure trove for additional revenue. But that’s only if it’s done well. 

Parking tends to be one of the biggest thorns in the side of a property manager. Because traditional systems — like spreadsheets and rentable items — are not built to handle tenant parking efficiently, teams aren't able to reap the full benefits parking has to offer as an ancillary revenue source. As soon as a team makes the decision to invest in a proper parking management system, the benefits often more than pay for themselves.

In this guide, we will explore those benefits, touching on both the financial and operational upside of a solid parking management strategy.

We’ve combed the data from all of our clients to identify the exact numbers to prove that there truly is ROI in parking management systems like Parkade. 

Understanding parking management

Before we dive into the numbers, let’s first establish a baseline of what exactly parking management entails. As any property manager will tell you, it involves much more than just hanging a tag on a resident’s car and calling it a day.

The key components of a parking management system are:

  • A system of record to track parking assignments, lease lengths, vehicle details, and parking prices, ideally integrated with your PMS.
  • An enforcement strategy that ensures parking rules are clear and establishes consequences (typically fines or towing) when someone breaks them.
  • A method to pay for parking, whether it’s bundled in with rent (which we don’t recommend) or paid for in a separate system.
  • A self-serve system for residents and guests to book long or short-term parking. 
  • If there is a gate on the property, provisioning and deprovisioning of gate entry should also be considered in the parking management strategy. 

The old-school way of addressing these needs isn’t cutting it anymore. Many properties are still using manual processes, like an Excel spreadsheet, rentable items, or even a physical piece of paper to keep track of their parking. 

And far too often, properties are relying too heavily on staff members to handle parking matters that take up a significant amount of time, like enforcement or guest parking.

Moreover, there’s one point that just can’t be ignored: If you’re still using old-school parking management systems like spreadsheets and rentable items, you’re leaving money on the table. 

So the parking management we’re discussing here that delivers positive ROI is a technology-led solution that automates all aspects of parking operations, improves resident experience, and unlocks new revenue streams.

Setting the stage: Residents value good parking

Delivering on resident expectations should be a main priority for any multifamily property, and parking is one area of the resident experience that is especially critical to consider here. 

65% of property managers cite parking as a top concern among residents. Whether it’s for existing residents or prospective residents, providing a simple, reliable, and flexible parking solution has a direct impact on the success of your property. 

Part of this is due to reputation. Properties have reported a 44% increase in their reputation scores after fixing their parking problems. And this boost in a reputation score can trickle into several different areas, boosting not only the number of new residents, but also leading to more renewals from existing residents.

But we know you want the hard dollar amounts, so let’s talk more about some real-world outcomes that Parkade's parking management software delivers. 

So, what do the numbers say about the ROI of parking management software?

Long-term net parking revenue for stabilized buildings

Once properties implement a system to help them optimize pricing and management of long-term parking, they see immediate gains in their long-term parking revenue. The average 6-month increase in net long-term parking revenue for the cohort of 7 properties we sampled was 24%, translating into thousands of extra dollars. 

Long-term net parking revenue for lease-ups

Better parking management also empowers properties to far outperform their projected revenue from long-term parking when they’re in the lease-up phase. 

On average, properties from the cohort we sampled estimated that they would bring in $15,925 on average from long-term parking revenue per month. But thanks to Parkade helping them optimize their parking strategy, better enforce their parking rules, and keep a better record of who is parking where, the average revenue from long-term parking was $23,450 on average, which is a 47.3% increase from the estimates in their pro forma. 

Total net parking revenue for stabilized buildings

For buildings that are already at full occupancy, the average increase in parking revenue sits at 31% once they implement Parkade’s parking management solution. 

Revenue metrics for lease-ups

The best time to implement new parking management systems is at the inception of the building. Getting parking right from the beginning ensures that you are maximizing total parking revenue from day one, as well as establishing a positive reputation around parking. Many properties underestimate the revenue from long-term parking and may often leave out potential short-term parking revenue altogether. 

When a few properties we worked with during this phase were estimating parking revenue at the start of their lease-up, they estimated around $35,000 on average. But the results, since they decided to go with Parkade right from the start, blew those numbers out of the water. In reality, they were able to bring in closer to $58,000 on average, which is a 66% increase from the estimates.

Short-term parking: An opportunity

The boost in revenue continues to be apparent when you zoom out to look at short-term parking, too. Short-term guest parking can be one of the most underutilized revenue streams, and represents a huge opportunity for multi-family properties to tap into. However, it's historically been very difficult or impossible for properties to see this revenue without parking management software that automates the process.

Especially in popular areas, like city centers or near shopping malls and sporting arenas, there’s often a high demand for short-term parking. When properties put a system in place to monetize this guest parking, they can unlock hundreds or even thousands of extra dollars per month. 

Automating guest parking

Without a good system in place to manage parking, many properties often leave guest parking as a free-for-all (meaning they don’t make money from it), or if they do attempt to monetize guest parking, it turns into a massive beast to handle. 

Erica, a property manager at Thrive Properties, told us about her pre-Parkade experience with guest parking, preventing them from delivering on a key resident need: “There was no world where we were doing short-term parking by the hour or even by the day because there was just no way to manage that.”

If you have a complicated or inconvenient system for guests to reserve parking, especially one where they have to walk into the office during office hours, guests are often more likely to try to get away with not paying for parking. (And if you don’t have a great system to enforce parking, they may very well get away with it).

With the right parking system, you’re able to give guests a flexible, 24/7 solution, removing any previous barriers that may have caused them to break the rules out of convenience. 
Maximizing guest parking availability

Another way that manual parking management may stand in the way of effectively monetizing guest parking is the inability to accurately track how many spots you have available for guests to reserve in the first place. 

Taylor, the property manager at Strata and Venue, shared her experience of desperately needing more guest parking and discovering they had a full 50 more open spots than they thought. 

“We actually had way more spots that we could have used for guest parking, but we didn’t know that because of the way we were using our parking system. Not to mention, we wouldn’t have the system to leverage them without a Parkade.”

When your parking management system gives you an accurate, real-time view of available spots, you can leverage guest parking to its full capacity.

Utilizing idle parking spots

A reliable parking-management system also allows you to make the most use of every single spot available. With technology that uses smart inventory management, properties can release idle or unassigned parking spots into the system for short-term use. So spots that would have otherwise been sitting empty between leases can suddenly be leveraged as an extra revenue-generating spot in the meantime. 

Net revenue for short-term guest parking

When properties have a great system to implement paid guest parking, without putting too much strain on their staff, they immediately see a boost in revenue.

They’re able to turn an operation that was perhaps bringing in no money — or some revenue, perhaps at the expense of staff time —  into a significant revenue source with little-to-no staff involvement. 

On average, Parkade customers experience a 303% increase in their guest parking revenue after Parkade fees. And there were some properties that saw almost a 400% increase.

Opex (operational expenses) savings

When handled manually, parking management can steal hours from on-site property management teams every week. Between fielding requests or complaints from residents, tracking down parking records, walking the lot to enforce rules, handling guest parking, and manually inputting rentable items, parking can quickly balloon into one of the most time-consuming tasks for staff.

Parking management software can automate away a lot of the most tedious aspects. For example, Parkade gives residents self-service access to reserve and pay for parking (while allowing for any rule sets the property wants to enforce), provides hands-off enforcement support, and even automates gate access via the app so that teams don’t have to worry about distributing or replacing clickers. 

Properties have seen that the time teams no longer spend on parking leads to a direct decrease in operational expenses. As a result, they can redistribute those team members' time to more meaningful tasks.

On average, we’ve seen properties decrease their operational expenses by $60,000-$100,000 from savings on parking operations alone. This means that they were able to save what’s equal to a full-time employee’s salary. 

Annual NOI improvement

All of the revenue metrics mentioned up until this point have been after Parkade's fees. 

When you roll everything up together — both the increase in revenue (after fees) and the opex savings — investing in parking management software has an incredibly positive impact on annual Net Operating Income (NOI).

Whether teams are looking to calculate their property value, secure financing, make operational decisions, or pitch to investors, NOI is one of the most critical numbers to boost. 

By coming at NOI from both sides, in terms of opex savings and revenue generation, parking management technology is extremely low-hanging fruit when it comes to boosting NOI. 

At the Parkade properties we surveyed, teams saw anywhere from a $66,000 to $126,000 improvement to their net operating income from parking alone. 

While parking may not seem like it deserves to be the biggest priority for many properties, the numbers tell a different story. By investing in a proper parking solution, properties are able to significantly improve upon all of their business goals, whether it’s boosting revenue, streamlining operations, improving resident experience, or all of the above. 

About Parkade

Parkade is the #1 parking management software for multi-family buildings. With our resident-facing app and staff dashboard, parking runs itself. Your team will boost revenue, reduce time spent on parking, and improve experience for residents and guests, all without lifting a finger.

Explore our features below, built for communities just like yours.

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