Making the case to implement new proptech

June 12, 2024

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Technology is one of the most important tools for doing your job better, easier, and quicker when it comes to multi-family property management. The numbers show this clear need. Between 2012 and 2020, proptech (property technology) companies raised over $43 billion. And this $43 billion has been put to good use. For any problem that you face as a property manager, there’s a good chance a tool exists that can help you eliminate or alleviate that problem. 

However, getting the “yes” to buying this new piece of technology may be another hurdle in itself. As the one with your hands in the day-to-day operations of your property, you can likely see the need for new software, and the benefits you stand to gain from implementing this software, but you also need to convince owners or upper management of its value.

We talked to several property management experts who have years of experience advocating for new technology, and they shared some of the most effective strategies for generating excitement about new tools. 

Emphasize the problem

First, take a step back and highlight the problem your new tool is meant to solve. Since they may not be as involved in the everyday processes of the property, you need to give owners and upper management evidence that this problem is having real, negative effects on your operations. 

Property manager Kristi Fickert gave us the following advice:

“Sometimes owners or higher-ups don't know there's an issue or don't perceive the issue to be as big as it may actually be. If you can break down the situation into digestible data that supports your case, it'll be super helpful in getting the outcome you want.”

This data could look a variety of ways. It could be an increase in the volume of complaints, an increase in the time spent handling something, or a decrease in completing a key task because time is being spent solving this problem without technology. 

Kristi shared this helpful slide from a recent webinar she hosted on “getting the yes” which shows how this may play out if you’re asking for a new marketing tool.

You may also want to pair this hard data with anecdotal data. Including quotes from other team members who would directly benefit from this technology is also highly valuable. This can help to show that the problem is felt by more than just your role. 

A property manager from one of our customer’s properties, Tailor Lofts, shared with us a story of when she first started at the property. The team was “using” a spreadsheet to manage their parking. We say using in quotes because within her first few weeks, she was told by another team member, “Oh we never use that because it’s such a mess.” 

Sharing stories like this highlights a part of the process that is clearly broken, making the need for this technology more urgent. 

Highlight the impact on resident satisfaction

Another way to prove that this technology is necessary and beneficial is to highlight its potential to impact the resident experience.

Property manager Sarah Dundee shared with us:

“If it’s something that gets complained about a lot by residents, you can link it back to resident satisfaction/retention.”

If the problem you’re trying to solve is resident-facing, you’ve likely gotten quite a few complaints from residents, whether it’s via email, maintenance requests, or conversations when they walk into the office. Start gathering all of these instances to be able to show hard proof that solving this problem is a clear priority. 

Taking parking management, for example. When parking is handled in an extremely manual (and often disorganized) manner, reviews like the one below are common. Being able to put these words from actual residents in front of owners can prove that this is a problem worth solving.

On top of proving the depth of the problem, you also want to demonstrate how the technology you want to implement will actually solve that problem. To do this, you want to come prepared with research. Know how the product works and what its strengths/weaknesses are.

If you’re able to find any testimonials from current users of the product showing a real impact on resident satisfaction or retention, that’s even better ammo to make the case for the technology. 

Demonstrate ROI

Ultimately, a property owner’s goal is to generate revenue from their properties. If you can demonstrate that the technology you’re looking to implement will have a good ROI, helping them boost their NOI (net operating income), you should be in good shape. 

To do this, you want to give them a breakdown of the costs vs. the benefits, and map out when they will see ROI, whether it’s in the first month or a few months down the road. You’ll need to gather clear cost estimates from the technology provider so that you know what you’ll be paying for on a monthly/yearly basis.

Compare this number to the potential extra revenue you can bring in. We’ll touch on time savings in the next section, but often there are other revenue-generators other than just saving time. For example, will this technology help you bring in more revenue from amenities, charge for guest parking, or eliminate any major costs like gate clickers

Include in this any small price increases that you may be able to implement to level out of the costs of this technology. 

As property manager Scott Karchner shared with us,

“For parking software, do you charge the same price for every spot? If so, what would more dynamic pricing look like to offset some of the cost?”

Being able to lay the numbers out in front of ownership or upper-level management and prove that the costs are going to be overshadowed by the gains will help to eliminate one of the biggest barriers to getting the yes for this technology. 

Prove time savings (and translate that into money)

As we hinted at above, time savings can be another extremely valuable way to prove that the piece of proptech you want to implement can generate revenue and also reduce operational expenses, boosting overall NOI at your building.

Especially as on-site teams are getting increasingly smaller, and since the workload hasn’t gone down in tandem, owners are always excited about ways to optimize operations. Many proptech tools are really effective at automating certain processes and saving time. If the tool you’re looking at can offer this benefit, make sure you highlight it. 

When you’re in the process of vetting a potential tool, make sure you ask for these numbers or seek them out in the case studies they have published. For example, in all of the Parkade case studies published, teams report anywhere from a 60-97% reduction in time spent on parking. This type of proven result can definitely make an owner’s ears perk up. 

Property manager Scott Karchner recommends taking this a step further, though.

“Don’t just show time savings, show what that time equals in payroll. Does the payroll savings cover the cost? We just did this for my company and the new process/tech is going to save the company money just by making two processes more efficient for staff. It also will allow staff to focus on other areas that tend to be overshadowed.” 

Be specific

When you’re making the ask to implement a new proptech tool, you want to eliminate any potential doubt by getting specific. 

Kristi Fickert told us,

“Try to be as specific as possible and don't generalize. Many times people will 'generalize' their ask instead of being as specific as possible.” 

Make sure you don’t fall into this trap. Come prepared by knowing exactly which tool is going to solve your problem and how it compares to alternatives. The more details you have prepared to combat any objections, the better off you’ll be in winning management’s approval. 

Still stuck in the olden days?

If you need some help getting owners to open up to a more tech-forward approach in general, you may want to take a more long-term approach: Hesitating to adopt new proptech tools can cost more in the long run. While sticking with familiar methods might feel safe, outdated systems limit your property's growth and resident satisfaction. Competitors are already using advanced technology to streamline operations and boost profits.

Adopting new technology is about future-proofing your processes. Innovative tools help you reduce manual labor, free up time for higher-value tasks, and lead to more efficient operations and happier residents.

So really, the question of whether to adopt new proptech is one of whether you want your business to endure or not.

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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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