Multifamily buildings like apartments and condos come with certain facility-wide costs. Maintaining the common areas, grounds, and parking are in everyone’s best interest. But that doesn’t mean your facility maintenance needs to be costly. One way to cut some expense from your budget is to actively improve the way you manage parking. Traditional parking management techniques have worked for a long time, but modern technology has made it possible to upgrade your approach to lighter-weight, more convenient, and less costly solutions.
Let’s take a look at five different ways you can lower the cost of maintaining the parking for your multifamily buildings.
1) Switch to a Mobile App Gate Opener
Gate openers and garage openers are a hallmark of a well-secured multifamily community. These little devices have been keeping the parking lots and grounds free of uninvited guests for decades. However, ordering and programming a new gate opener for each resident accrues a cost that is either covered by the building or charged to the resident themselves.
Residents also need new openers any time one is lost or broken. A low-cost solution to this ongoing process of ordering and replacing openers is to go mobile. Mobile phones are now able to send an opening signal if the correct app is used. This allows your residents and their registered guests to come and go using their own devices instead of a separate opener.
2) Provide a Live Parking Map
For larger parking lots and garages, keeping track of each specific spot can turn into it’s own challenge. Both for parking enforcement and for new residents and guests looking for their assigned spot. Rather than keeping physical maps or dealing with constant confusion, you can set up a live map of your parking area that can help each person identify exactly the spot they’re looking for.
A live map that tracks parking assignments will make it easier for parking enforcement to know who belongs in which spot. Even new guests if they have made a parking reservation. It can also guide people to their spots, solve parking assignment disputes, and show changes when the map is updated.
3) Rent Out Guest Parking Spots
The best way to reduce the cost of your parking management is to make a little profit. If you have more spots than your residents and regular guests can use, then consider renting a few extra spots to people who need parking nearby. While this may have led to a security fiasco in the past, today’s mobile technology makes it possible to rent specific parking spots, and then only open the gate to the person who reserved the spot.
A mobile app can then guide parking renters directly to your rental spots, reducing the chances that they will try to park in a spot reserved for regulars. This is an excellent opportunity to make a little operating capital back from your parking area and keep careful track of who is parking near your facility.
4) Repaint the Lot with Numbered Spots
Old and indistinct parking spaces are a surprisingly frequent cause of problems. If two residents or guests disagree on which parking spot is assigned, disputes can arise. One of the best things you can do for your parking management, especially during other upgrades, is simply to repaint the lot. Every separating line should be painted over and brightened. Handicap spaces should be clearly marked.
We also strongly recommend numbering your spots. A live map is twice as effective if residents and guests can match an assigned spot with the exact number of a spot in the real world. You might also consider color-coding your painted areas to clearly indicate which spots are for residents vs guests vs parking renters.
5) Register Vehicles Instead of Tagging
If you are spending money on parking tags distributed to residents, you can stop. Managing your parking through an app allows you to register specific vehicles that belong to each person cleared to park near your facility. Windshield tags don’t transfer easily, making the app more convenient for people who trade cars or temporarily use a rental.
The app will track their make, model, color, and license plate so that you can easily compare the booked vehicle to the one in each spot. This makes enforcement easy. And if someone needs to change cars, they simply update the information in the app for their assigned, reserved, or rented spot.
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Updating your parking management technology is the key to lower cost overall. By renting parking spots in a busy neighborhood, posibly even during specific hours, you may even be able to turn a few parking spots into a profit. For more information about how to reduce costs and increase ROI for your multifamily properties, contact us today!
