How Do I Manage a Private Car Park?

“Private car park” is quite a broad term. For the purpose of this answer, I’m going to presume you are talking about a private car park located in an apartment block or office which is only open to residents or staff.

There are surprising number of components to managing a car park. They key areas for a private car park are:

Access: how people get in and out of your carpark will have serious implications for all other aspects of managing the car park from space allocation to security to enforcement. Ensuring only the people who are meant to have access can get in and out of your car park.

Traditionally people will approach this in one of two ways.

i) Place lots and lots of signage warning people about parking without permission, offenders are then punished with fines, clamps or towing depending on the territory.

ii) Invest in a barrier or gate system which can only be opened by specific people using a fob/access card/phone access style system.

Allocation: once you ensure only the people who should be in the car park have access, you need to ensure that people park where they are meant to. This is easy if you have more spaces than people. However, for the majority of car parks this is never the case. There are lots of complicated ways to do this like manual numbering systems. These can be a headache to administrate and you’re probably better off getting one of the emerging “Office Parking Management Systems” which are taking a lot of pain out of car park management.

Security: people want to feel that both they and their car is safe when they park it. It’s important to have sufficient lighting on site so that people aren’t loitering in dark corners. If you have a small site CCTV which is monitored remotely is a good solution. However, if you have a bigger site it might be worth investing in a full-time security guard or at a minimum outsource to a company who have mobile patrol teams.

Enforcement: the final pillar of managing a private car park is enforcement. No matter what happens you’ll always get rogue parkers. Maybe it’s a staff member who is giving his access card to his mother when she is shopping near the office or a wily local resident who has abandoned a car in your office parking lot. Having a strong and legal deterrent as mentioned above like parking fines or towing should stop people from taking advantage of your car park. Often times you will outsource this enforcement to a third party who will monitor and execute.

The great news is that all of this used to be manual but products like ParkOffice are changing the game, allowing car park owners to automate massive amounts of their operations. Save yourself the hassle and let technology do the work.

• Increase employee happiness and retention.
• Maximise occupancy by parking cars when key staff are out of the office.
• Reduce administrative burden of parking management.
• Ensure your company is only paying for the parking spaces they need.
• Reduce your employees carbon footprint by allowing them to travel more responsibly.