So you’ve just launched your brand new building, or you’re gearing up to launch. While you may have already put in a lot of hard work before this moment, this next year — your lease-up phase — is what will determine much of the success of your complex.
This lease-up period, which is the time between construction being completed and your units reaching about 90% occupancy, is critical. The longer your lease-up time takes, the more risk you incur since you are operating with a negative cash flow.
During this time, your goal should be to get all of the units leased as quickly as possible, which includes marketing efforts, giving tours, screening applicants, collecting security deposits, and more.
The costs of marketing spend, staff, leasing events and networking — which you won’t recoup until later.
Trying to market with no established brand authority or trust if this is your first building, or your first building in a new location.
Immense pressure as a property manager to manage and accelerate the leasing process, including training staff, running background checks, networking and more.
Pressure to increase the property’s revenue in the short term, where some owners plan to sell the building shortly after opening and look to parking to drive significant income
Another challenge that many lease-up managers tend to overlook for too long: parking management.
Below, we created an easy visual that lists all of the parking tasks you’ll need to check off during the lease-up process. Feel free to download this to save for later.
This is just a high-level overview, though, so keep reading to get into the nitty gritty of parking management during a lease-up.
When you’re just kicking off the lease-up process, you have a mostly empty building and parking lot or garage. It may be tempting to get by with little to no parking management at first. But as you may already know (especially if you’re reading this piece), you will quickly outgrow this free-for-all strategy.
As your units fill up and your new residents bring their cars with them, unless your lease up is a garden-style community in the exurbs with 3 spots per unit, parking will quickly turn into a mess if left to its own devices.
It’s way harder to wrangle a problem that’s already in dire straits than to address it before it becomes a problem in the first place.
Failure to consider parking from the outset can sabotage your long-term success because it takes time away from staff who are left picking up the pieces of a poor parking strategy, and it can lead to lost revenue.
Poorly planned parking also threatens your ability to deliver on one of the things that your residents care about most. According to a recent survey, 68% of renters indicated that “reliable parking with controlled access” is one of their top priorities when determining which apartment to live in.
Parking can be a compelling marketing asset
Given the importance that renters place on their parking experience, this gives you an incredible opportunity to leverage great planning as a marketing asset that gets more people through the door for a tour.
When you invest time and resources into state-of-the-art parking facilities and seamless parking operations, you can reap the benefits before the first resident even moves in. Many complexes that have well-planned parking will highlight it in their marketing materials such as their website, brochures, and social media posts.
You can also take advantage of parking by incorporating it into leasing incentives and promotions without sacrificing the ease with which you can control parking. For example, you could offer a free upgrade to premium parking, or a month-to-month parking lease for the same price as a fixed-term lease.
When you have a reliable way to manage and plan your parking, you’re able to see the incentives you’re reasonably able to offer to fill your empty units faster without causing you headaches later down the road.
The earlier you start planning parking management, the better
Hopefully, by now you’re sold on the idea that parking should not be an afterthought in the lease-up process. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle to get your community filled up with long-term residents who will have a great experience.
While you are likely working with physical parking blueprints that you don’t control over and that will act as constraints, you do have control over more flexible considerations like your access systems and tech infrastructure.
The earlier you can decide this the better, because it gives you the most time for adjustment.
If you’re lucky enough to be on board before your lease-up officially starts, this is the time to start considering parking. Establishing parking protocols and tools before you get ramped up gives you the foresight to accurately assess your parking needs, identify solutions, and integrate your parking plans into the overall lease-up strategy.
If you’re brought in mid-lease-up and realize that parking has been neglected up to this point, no worries, there’s still a major opportunity to pivot and get things right.
The importance of early parking planning in lease-up success
Because of the seemingly low urgency of parking planning at the very beginning, many property managers opt to take care of parking later, once they tackle matters that seem more pressing. However, more often than not, it soon becomes a problem too big to ignore.
Operationally, this can be a nightmare.
We’ve seen many clients make the mistake of putting off parking for too long, and they’ve been left to scramble for solutions once they start feeling the negative effects. One of our customers, a luxury building near downtown LA, experienced this exact situation.
LEASE-UP CASE STUDY #1
This property came to Parkade after the building had already opened and they were managing parking with a spreadsheet. Even though street parking was often hard to come by, they left parking as an afterthought throughout their lease-up process and beyond.
This meant that they had established a history of bad record-keeping and enforcement. Their “system” was a spreadsheet that their team had to manually fill out, and since it wasn’t the most reliable record, they were often dependent on individual team members’ knowledge. This led to some big problems when certain team members were out of office.
The effect was this: they weren’t confident which residents were paying for a spot and where, which resulted in a disorganized parking process that frustrated residents and sucked up hours each week for staff.
On top of the complexity of managing parking, there were some simpler problems that would have been easy to fix in the beginning but became difficult to walk back once already in operation, like a confusing spot numbering system that frustrated staff and residents alike.
Stories like these are common. While it’s not impossible to resolve operational problems that arise out of neglected parking planning, it ends up damaging that initial resident experience and leads to more hassle for your team than necessary. Their team noticed that after they took a strategic approach to parking with Parkade, so many of their problems were resolved. Now, the team who was there for the implementation continues to preach the importance of great parking planning and will recommend it wholeheartedly at every property they work at.
At a minimum, you’re missing out on revenue
Even if you don’t yet notice any major operational challenges due to poor or nonexistent parking planning, the best-case scenario here is missing out on extra revenue.
That customer we mentioned above? When they were managing parking with a spreadsheet 75% of the way through their lease-up, they were earning only $8,100/month. Just 4 months after they adopted Parkade, they were earning $21,000/month. This was largely due to the ease of short-term parking, improved records, and revenue management on long-term parking leases.
And extra revenue is especially important in this lease-up process since you’re often running on a deficit for several months.
Simple planning like pricing your spots correctly and with multiple price tiers, offering short-term parking, and monetizing guest parking or special parking amenities can boost your revenue and help you capitalize on your parking from the very beginning.
On average, we see that most of our customers rake in around 63% more per month on parking alone.
Create good systems from the beginning so you don’t have to break down old ones
Planning in advance gives you the opportunity to get it right from the beginning.
If you invest a little extra time and resources into building it the right way from the ground up, you’re going to save yourself a lot of headaches, time, and money because you won’t have to worry about breaking down existing systems to course-correct later.
So now that you know the advantages of considering parking from the outset — and the risks of not — let’s go through what exactly this planning entails.
Initial considerations for parking management
Your first step in beginning to plan your parking for a lease-up is assessing your parking needs.
Estimating the number of parking spots needed
Eunice Lee, the Community Manager of Lease Ups at Sares Regis Group, told us that the first place she always starts when planning parking for a lease-up is assessing the number of available parking spaces relative to the number of units in the community. “You want to ensure there are enough spaces for residents, visitors, and potential growth in the future,” she told us.
You may or may not be coming into a property with your lot or garage already built. Whether you’re putting the finishing touches on the paving and striping plan or you need to work within the confines of the already-built structures, you’ll need to estimate what your parking needs will be to strategize accordingly.
Here are some tips to help you estimate how much parking you’ll need.
Consider the area around you. Suburban or rural areas that are farther from transit typically have more residents with cars since they have to commute to work, errands, and social functions. Urban areas that are highly walkable or located close to public transportation will often have fewer car-dependent residents.
Look at the similar apartment complexes around you. If there are other apartment complexes nearby of around the same size, maybe take a drive around their parking lots at different times of day to see how many spots they have and if they’re at capacity or have room to spare. Do some comp shopping and ask how full their parking is. Or if you're in a pinch for time, simply look at Google Maps satellite to find surface lots and count the number of spots per unit.
Does your community have a similar ratio?
Estimate based on unit size. If you have mostly studio apartments or one bedrooms, you’re likely going to need a lot less parking than if you have primarily 2 or 3 bedroom units. You can also use unit size to estimate needs — i.e. Plan for one car per studio or 1-bedroom unit, 2 cars per 2-bedroom unit, and 3 per 3-bedroom unit. While this is a common rule of thumb, you don’t want to use this as the only indicator since the actual number can vary based on location, the walkability of the area, typical tenant age, and other factors.
Consider guest parking needs. It may be hard to estimate how social your residents are going to be, but it is relatively simple to determine how easy it will be for guests to find parking. If there is ample street parking nearby, you may not need to address guest parking in your plans. But if street parking will be difficult or impossible for guests, you likely want to slot some guest spots into your parking plan. A typical rule of thumb is to assume that 5% of your units will have guests over at any given moment.
Where will your staff park? If you have a large on-site team, you don’t want them to have to compete with residents and guests every day for parking. Make sure you designate spots for staff to park or at least include these spots in your total calculation for the number of spots needed if you opt for unassigned parking.
Another benefit of dedicated staff parking: These spots are open for extra guest parking during off hours!
Do the math so you don’t overpromise
While you may not have control over how much total parking there is to work with, you do have control over how you leverage available spaces to suit your needs.
You want to make sure that you’re very clear on the amount of parking you have available and strategies to balance that with your guests’ needs. Do not make the mistake of overpromising parking spots.
John, a property manager we talked to told us about a horror story of when he took over a lease-up from a previous company:
“The fired company had rented multiple parking spots to several residents. End result was we were out of parking spaces at 90%. Had to revoke spaces from multiple residents. Not fun.”
We heard a similar story from one of our customers who came to us a month after opening.
LEASE-UP CASE STUDY #2
Before they came to Parkade, this team felt in over their heads, scared of what was going to happen if they ran out of parking, and unsure of where to go next.
They promised spots to too many people, causing them to run out of spots before they filled their building. Meaning they either needed to say, “sorry, there’s no more parking left” to the people touring the remaining apartments — not exactly the best selling point — or scrap their current system and rethink their parking strategy. They chose the latter.
With the help of Parkade, they were able to resolve this problem by charging for parking to manage demand, which was something they had never done at any of their other properties, and establishing rules that limited number of cars per type of unit.
So while they were able to find a solution after the fact, it’s best to avoid the trap of overpromising in the first place.
Do your target residents expect special luxury amenities?
Aside from the logistics of how much parking you’ll need, you also have to consider the types of parking you need.
Special amenities like EV charging, covered spaces, extra-large spaces, etc. may be not only be a valuable marketing asset for your team as you try to fill empty units as quickly as possible, but they may also be a critical deciding factor for your residents, especially if you have a luxury community.
Make sure you consider how you’re going to incorporate these amenities into your parking plan. For example, you’ll want to think through how many spots will feature these amenities, and how much you will charge for them.
Operational considerations
Once you’ve considered your base needs for parking during your lease-up phase, the next important step is to consider how to best manage that parking to improve your resident experience and make sure your team isn’t being burdened with hours of tedious work.
Record-keeping
When you’re in the midst of a lease-up, there’s a lot happening, so it’s easy for parking records to fall through the cracks. With so many people moving in (and claiming parking spots) all at once, without the right system, it becomes easy for records to become disorganized and out of date.
The parking records you keep are the foundation of your entire parking strategy. In a “traditional” (or as we would argue, inefficient) lease-up process, teams will use a combination of systems, including a spreadsheet to track who’s parking where, add parking spots as “rentable items” to their property management system to bill residents, and then they may hand out physical items like decals hang tags to further keep track of this system.
But a few key problems arise:
These “systems” aren’t talking to each other so information can get lost.
This leads to a mountain of manual work for the leasing team.
As a result of bad record-keeping, you could get a bunch of people parking in your garage who aren’t paying or may not even live there, and you have no reliable way of knowing.
This all leads to an overall negative initial resident experience and potentially lost revenue.
So we can’t emphasize enough how important it is to establish a great record-keeping system from the very beginning so that the rest of the parking planning that you do doesn’t go to waste.
We’ll go into more detail about what this connected system exactly looks like.
Reserved or unreserved parking?
This is typically one of the first operational decisions that property managers make. We find that in most scenarios, most newly-built communities opt for reserved parking, as it leads to the best experience.
If you want to dive deeper into this topic, you can check out our full blog post about it. But if you want a quick rundown of when you offer reserved parking, here are the top five indicators:
You don't have dedicated resources for enforcement — i.e. someone to walk and patrol the lot — as you can rely on residents to report issues in their spots
Residents are moving in with multiple cars, but their lease only includes one spot (meaning they are likely to sneak their car into an empty spot)
You're located in a popular area where parking is limited, meaning the public is more likely to park in unreserved spaces.
The quality of parking spots varies (size, features, distance to doors, etc)
Based on your research of residents in similar complexes nearby, they’ll prefer it
What are the situations where unreserved parking might make more sense?
You have ample parking and anticipate easily meeting demand from both residents and guests
Your parking spots are pretty much identical
Numbering system
If you opt to go the reserved parking route, you’ll need to implement some kind of numbering system. This can be a surprisingly complicated process. As we mentioned earlier in the cautionary tale of one of our clients, a confusing numbering scheme can add fuel to the fire that is disorganized parking, and it could potentially sabotage even the most otherwise organized planning.
Chase, one property manager that we talked to, has a really great recommendation for avoiding some headaches:
“I always recommend having a different parking numbers system than the apartment numbering system, because it stops people from thinking a spot should be theirs simply because it has the same number as their unit. For example, if you have units 1-70, number your spaces from 230 to 300.”
At a minimum, don’t perfectly match your parking numbers to unit numbers. If your apartments are 1A, 1B, 1C, etc. don’t number spots 1A, 1B, 1C. That locks you into assigning those spots to those corresponding spots, which you may or may not want to do.
Another best practice is to always put spaces in numerical order, rather than putting odds on one side and evens on the other, and to use truly sequential numbering throughout your parking areas — not separate numbering systems for compact, accessible, EV, etc. This helps you avoid unnecessary complications that can cause confusion and lead to people parking in the wrong spots because they assume it’s in the wrong place.
Security measures and access control
The next step here is to decide how you’re going to not only keep your community safe but also how you’re going to control parking to ensure that your lot or garage isn’t being overtaken by non-residents.
Typically, this leads you to the question of “gate or no gate?”
We have a whole guide on everything you need to know about gates (and we mean everything), so if you’re facing this tricky decision right now, make sure you add it to your reading list.
But in short, here are the indicators that you do need a gate:
You’re in a busy, central area
You have complicated parking rules that would be difficult to enforce manually
You’re in a high-crime area
You have extremely limited parking availability
You want to charge for parking
It’s what your residents want
As for the situations in which a gate may not be worth the thousands of dollars you’d need to invest:
You’re in a very small, rural area
You have an open community philosophy
You have space constraints at your access point
You have a very limited budget
You want a fully frictionless experience
Access method
If you do decide to get a gate, that opens up a whole new consideration of how your residents and their guests will gain access.
A surprising amount of weight rests on picking the right access method. The method you choose can impact:
Your operational costs to install and repair devices
Ease of access for guests and residents
Ongoing provisioning and de-provisioning considerations
The security of your community
There are a variety of gate access options out there, but we’ve seen that a smartphone-based access system is the easiest and most flexible option. Not only do most residents prefer this method, with 59% of respondents to a survey saying that they want mobile access control, but it also provides more flexibility, better guest access, and secure access.
Pricing strategies
When it comes to deciding on your parking pricing, you first need to determine whether your parking will have a price.
Although free parking continues to be the norm across multi-family properties in America, there’s a trend towards paid parking given its benefits to your revenue, and perhaps surprisingly, your residents, too.
When you charge separately for parking, you reap the following benefits:
Lower base rents, since your rent is no longer subsidizing this “free” perk
Better managed demand — i.e. People aren’t grabbing up more spots than they need just because they’re free
Gain the ability to dynamically price spots based on special amenities or desirability
Increase revenue from parking — sometimes tens of thousands of extra dollars per month
While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for the actual dollar amount that you should charge for parking, a good place to start is to do some “comp shopping” by checking out prices for parking in other complexes nearby. You don’t want to be charging a ton more than your competition unless you have premium parking features they don’t. And you don’t want to be charging less and miss out on potential revenue.
Feel free to check out our more in-depth parking pricing guide for more extensive guidance, but generally, it’s a good idea to pick 1-3 different price points — i.e. $50/month for surface parking, $100/month for the gated garage and $150/month for an EV spot in the garage — and to make sure you adjust your pricing based on demand once your lot starts filling up which solutions like Parkade can automate for you.
Generally, if you have too many open spots, your prices should be adjusted lower, and if you have a growing waitlist for spots, you should probably raise prices a bit.
Enforcement
As much as we’d like to believe that residents will be respectful and responsible in adhering to the parking rules you put in place, the reality is you will have people who break the rules — even people who don’t belong to your community and sneak cars onsite.
It’s important to decide on the strategies you will enact to prevent unauthorized parking behavior, as well as how you will respond to that behavior to disincentivize people from becoming repeat offenders.
This topic opens up a whole range of additional considerations that is impossible to condense in this one single section (make sure you look out for our upcoming guide on it!), but generally, here are the strategies you need to effectively enforce parking:
Implement a system to reliably track who is allowed to park where. Many properties opt for more traditional strategies like hang tags or spreadsheets, but we’d recommend digital records that are always, automatically up-to-date.
Consider how you will catch people who are parked where they’re not allowed. A gate can help to prevent this in the first place, but if people do sneak by, manual patrols and reports from other residents can catch them,
Decide how you will penalize violators. Typically, communities are harsher on non-residents since they’re unable to contact them to move, and many teams opt to tow or boot them. For residents parking in unauthorized spaces, it’s common to first issue a warning if they move within a certain time, and then move to fines, boots, or tows if they don’t move or become repeat offenders. You’ll want to map out all of these protocols beforehand so that you can be consistent.
And finally, how will you deal with corrections? The unauthorized parker is the only one affected in this scenario, you also have to consider solutions for the person whose spot was taken. It’s helpful to track empty spots where they can be temporarily relocated, if possible.
Systems like Parkade can automate and manage all these enforcement strategies for you.
Solutions to manage your parking
There are clearly a lot of moving pieces to managing parking during a lease-up and beyond. You can see why parking becomes a sneaky thorn in the side of even the most innovative properties.
The crux of this problem comes from the fact that many teams use manual, old-fashioned systems to manage the beast that is parking. Some of the possible methods we mentioned before, such as manually distributing hang tags, tracking who has a spot where in a spreadsheet, and physically walking around a parking lot to catch unauthorized parkers do not scale.
So now, as promised, we’re gonna dig into what a good parking record-keeping system may look like.
The most strategic property managers are now looking to digitize their parking operations before residents even move in. This ensures a strong foundation for an easy-to-manage, highly profitable parking system.
It aligns with all of your current challenges and future goalssome text
Are you looking to increase ROI?
Improve resident experience?
Streamline operations?
Differentiate your property?
All of the above?
It gives you the features you need, including:some text
Integration with your existing property management systems
Integration with your gate access system
It offers flexible leases, including both short-term and long-term options
It’s easy to use—both for residents and your staff
It helps you automate enforcement
It gives you access to data and insights to tweak your strategy as needed
Parkade is the ultimate solution to get parking right from the beginning, and it checks all these boxes.
Our software integrates with your property management system to automate all aspects of parking operations, including tenant parking assignments, guest parking, dynamic pricing, payment, enforcement, and more.
Eunice Lee, the Community Manager of Lease Ups at Sares Regis Group expressed to us how helpful Parkade has been to her team during lease-ups, helping them:
Bring in extra revenue by leasing out empty spots as guest parking
Leverage the Parkade team’s expertise to determine the best parking rates
Collect fees directly from residents
Eliminating the news for fobs or clickers by giving everyone with an active parking reservation seamless access to the garage right from their phone.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Parkade for your team is the significant decrease in work they need to do. Eunice told us,
“Parkade saves our leasing team time and resources by managing parking assignments for new residents and maintaining the parking log during turnovers.”
We give residents the opportunity to grab spots, update car information, and pay for parking directly through the app. This shields your team from having to constantly update these records.
Our always-up-to-date web dashboard gives you reliable access to parking records, and our mobile app provides an easy, modern way for residents to find and book parking for themselves and their guests. We also take care of enforcement for you — the app provides instant spot relocation for residents who find a car in their spot, and our customer service team is available 24/7 to handle any other parking issues that arise.
On average, at building stabilization and over a 6-month period, Parkade boosts parking revenue by 63%.
When lease-up parking planning goes right: a success story
The best way to make the case for Parkade as a property manager’s best friend during a lease-up is to walk you through a scenario where it went right.
Simone, a high-end apartment complex in San Diego came to Parkade about two months before they opened their shiny new building to residents. Located in Little Italy, a bustling neighborhood in San Diego, they knew they needed a lot of guest parking. They also placed a lot of importance on resident experience since they were catering to a high-end market.
So they came to us because they knew they needed to get parking right from the beginning.
They had done some light parking planning, including deciding on assigned parking and designating two prices. They also wanted 6 visitor spots, but weren’t sure how to manage them since they were behind the gate and weren’t sure how to give visitors access.
Once Parkade came on board, everything fell into place. On top of strategic consulting — helping Simone identify that their prices were too low and over-simplified, which would likely lead to shortages — we also gave them a reliable method to give both guests and residents access to their garage with a simple mobile app.
The results?
They were able to take full advantage of the guest parking they knew they would need. On top of happy residents, they’re now bringing in around $2,700 per month from guest parking alone, while only halfway stabilized.
And thanks to the tweaks in their pricing strategy, we’ve helped them bring in $20,000 in additional revenue in the first 3 months, as compared to what they would have otherwise brought in.
And another major benefit we can’t ignore: they’re onsite team hardly has to think about parking. What could have spun into a massive time-suck for their team is now something they can spend just minutes on every week.
So you’ve seen the best case (when you do consider parking before the lease-up) and the worst case (when you push it off until later). Which reality would you want to be true for you?
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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.
Parking Management Software ROI
