The other curve your company needs to flatten to get back to work

July 10, 2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

As states succeed in flattening the COVID-19 curve (some faster than others), the conversation is beginning to shift to how to safely re-open the nation’s workplaces while keeping employees safe at work. 

It’s clear that last year’s office configuration won’t work, but last year’s commute and parking at your workplace won’t work either — companies will need to flatten their parking curve to accommodate their team. 

We’ve put together a guide for companies to follow on how you can not just enable a safe return to work, but make it far easier than ever for your team to have a safe, reliable commute with the help of Parkade’s tools for workplaces

This guide explains:

  1. Why last year’s commute won’t work.
  2. It’s time for reliable parking at work
  3. What happens if you run out of parking? 
  4. How to expand your parking supply
  5. What handy commute resources you may need

1. Why last year’s commute won’t work.

The world was a different place before COVID-19 and so was your approach to commuting. 

The biggest trend that’s become clear out of the mobility data we’re already seeing is that there will be two major shifts in how people commute: First, they plan to come by personal automobile in far greater numbers than before COVID-19. 

That trend is already bearing out: While transit usage is down 80-90% in most communities, the rates of people driving and using micromobility (cycling, walking, scooting, etc) has already surpassed their pre-COVID-19 rates. 

2020 mobility trends
2020 Mobility Trends

The CDC has gone so far as to encourage employers to offer incentives for their employees to utilize commute modes that minimize close contact.

So, for any workplace where any kind of significant chunk of employees formerly utilized public transit, you should expect many more of your employees to be driving their own cars. 

Second, variability in work location (between home and the office) is poised to massively increase. Even offices where nearly everyone came to work every weekday are likely to see a significant number of employees start working from home at least a few days a month, if not each week. 

Will you work from home post-COVID?

Making matters more complicated, many employees have spent all of the COVID-19-imposed quarantine working from home, and reducing their commute to about 15 seconds — the time it takes to walk from their office to their desk, couch, patio or wherever they’ve been working. 

While some employees may be eager to return to work, others are much less excited. And the commute is a major part of that anxiety: Most workers do not miss their commute. Not even a little.

Car drivers: Do you miss your commute

So, like it or not, employers need to make their team’s commute easier and more enjoyable. At the same time, with such drastic commute changes happening so quickly for so many, employers must do more to ensure that everyone who needs to come back to work can get there — whatever the mode. 

2. It’s time for reliable parking at work

At many workplaces, 76% of which provide parking on-site, parking was a huge question mark before COVID-19. Some days it could be easy and employees would snag a spot by their door. Other days, they might miss out on a spot entirely and park off-site, resulting in workers from Bremerton to Pasadena doing the “parking shuffle” every 2-3 hours. 

Now, with many more workers planning to drive to work, on more variable schedules, parking will be far more frustrating than ever if left unmanaged. Employers will be counted on to provide reliable parking and accommodate the increased demand. 

That’s where Parkade comes in. 

Gone are the days where spots are first-come, first-served or when one spot gets assigned to a single employee for months or years. With Parkade, employers can offer parking spots by the day (or even by the hour)  for employees to reserve — and only for their employees, as Parkade’s parking groups are private. This allows employees to reserve parking only on the days they will need it and to keep parking open for those who plan to use it.

With Parkade’s innovative technology, you’ll be able to balance reliable parking with maximizing usage of the lot. If someone isn’t coming in, they can release their spot back into the pool, making it available for someone else to use again. 

Office managers can even make some spots reservable for special cars or types of people. It’s a great way to provide reliability for those who really need it: Expectant mothers, EV drivers with range anxiety (especially if you have EV chargers) and carpool drivers. We've put together a handy video demo on how this can work:

Put your team’s mind at ease, and let them know where they’ll park before they even leave for the office. And to ease (and test) the transition, workplaces could start by making only some spots reservable, while leaving others first-come, first-served. 

That’s a good way to compare the two systems, and get employee feedback on which they prefer.

3. What happens if you run out of parking?

By now, you might be convinced it’s time to make your parking lot reservable. But the next question is likely “OK, but what happens when we run out of parking?” 

With demand for parking at your workplace likely set to skyrocket over time, we want to lay out some strategies you can employ to both decrease demand for parking and increase the supply of parking.

Let’s start with demand for parking from your employees. While it’s not life or death, the concept has some similarities with flattening the COVID-19 curve. 

The COVID-19 curve we've been working to flatten

With COVID-19, states had a limited hospital capacity, and took drastic steps to ensure that the influx of patients didn’t overwhelm that capacity. Somewhat similarly, a workplace has a set parking capacity (say, 100 parking spots), and as employees return to work, companies will want to do their best to ensure the number of drivers is less than the total number of parking spaces (“parking capacity”). 

That will be difficult, because companies need to be prepared for many more employees to opt to drive to work during and after COVID-19. Yet, it’s very likely that a good chunk of your team has options — and might be willing to commute via a different mode if you give them a slight nudge to do so.

Demand for parking at your workplace

Most of your employees will probably be happy to pay even a couple dollars a day for a reserved spot at work. Facing a small fee, however, others will choose to:

  • Ride a bike or scooter to work (ebikes have drastically expanded the viability of cycling)
  • Carpool with another coworker, organized directly or via via Scoop/Waze Carpool (direct coworkers minimize germ exposure outside your team)
  • Set up a low-capacity vanpool with fellow employees
  • Take a low-occupancy ridesharing service like Lyft or Uber

To lower parking demand, all your company needs to do is to get those with good transportation options to utilize them. The employee who lives 1.5 mi from the office may start cycling instead of driving if given encouragement.

Even better, you can use the revenue collected to further incentivize a shift in mode choice. A company with 100 parking spots that charges $100/mo to park (that’s less than $5/business day), will collect $120,000/yr in parking revenue. Since employees can pay for parking pre-tax, that will really only cost employees around $80,000 in post-tax wages. 

The company could use the revenue to prop up their balance sheet or pay for perks, or use that $120,000 to incentivize employee behavior even further. For example, a company could give cash bonuses to the people who don’t drive, pay for employees’ ridesharing/vanpooling/bikesharing or (one of our favorites) give some or all of the money away in a lottery — with only people who didn’t use parking that month being eligible. 

Combining a small fee for parking with a cash-based incentive system for non-parkers can convince double-digit percentages of your employees not to drive. The impact isn’t speculative either. This pay-to-park-or-get-paid system was implemented at Lyft HQ, and their head of HR at the time, Nasim Assadi, told us: 

“We saw fewer people driving their own vehicles, and the ones who did reported a faster, more reliable and less stressful commute. With the program in place, we were able to double the size of the company, with the same number of parking spots.”

Lyft case study: Charging for parking

Like with offering reserved parking, you also don’t need to charge for all spots for this to work! Try starting with the best spots, and see if they get reserved. If and when you run out these paid spots, start moving other spots from free to paid. 

As a side bonus, when your employees pay for things pre-tax, it reduces their taxable earnings, which reduces the company’s payroll tax burden. In that example of a company charging $100/mo for 100 spots that collects $120,000 in parking revenue, they’ll also save $8,400/yr in payroll taxes.

Your CFO will cheer, especially when they realize the reduced parking demand helps avoid moving to a new office just to satisfy your parking needs. 

4. How to expand your parking supply

Not interested in charging for your existing parking, or, perhaps, don’t have any existing parking? We have an idea that could delight your employees: Add more parking! 

COVID-19 has forced businesses in every city, on nearly every block, to close completely or operate at reduced capacity. That means there’s likely another parking lot very close to your office that will be sitting empty for a long time. 

Parkade can make it possible for you to rent that lot monthly for your team, and then pass the cost on to your employees who will pay pre-tax — and again, that lowers your payroll taxes, so renting parking actually saves your company money. 

If you’ve gauged parking demand and confirmed your team needs extra parking, and would pay for it, use Parkade to price the lot so that you break even. 

Your employees get reliable, reservable parking and can reshare it with others when they stay home, your company actually saves money and you get to help the business down the street stay afloat. It’s a win-win-win! 

Expand your parking capacity

Just talk to nearby businesses or parking lots, rent part or all of their lot, and add those spots to your company’s Parkade. Just set prices as desired to break even, and get the word out to your team. 

5. Some handy commute resources

We’ve prepared a few resources to help you with this transition. 

  • Create your own model: We’ve created a spreadsheet you can use to model out the revenue, costs and impact to your employees and company. Just open this spreadsheet, and go to File -> Make a copy.
  • Survey your employees: We’ve created a Google Form you can use to survey your own employees,and help predict commute habits once they return to the office. To copy it, just hit “Request edit access”. We’ll make a copy and share it with you, so you can edit it as desired.

Have questions about how this can work at your office? Check out workplaces resources, or drop us a note here. We’d love to talk, and help your team return to the office safely and reliably. 

Some other helpful resources:

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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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