In Defense of +35% Parking

In the last post I claimed a building with the right data behind it can confidently run 35% more parkers than spaces. That number deserves a defense, so here it is.

Short version: +35% is not the ceiling. It’s the floor. Most garages leave far more on the table than that. The reason is that every parking operator in the country is selling a product — the parking space — against the wrong unit of inventory.

The unit of inventory is wrong

A parking space isn’t a thing. It’s a thing, available during a window of time. That sounds pedantic until you look at how buildings actually sell parking: one contract per space, billed monthly, assigned to one person. That’s a lease on a physical asset. It’s how garages have been sold since the 1960s.

The problem is that a person with an assigned space uses it, on average in a typical office building today, somewhere between 45% and 65% of working hours. Hybrid schedules, travel, sick days, holidays, and the simple fact that not everyone shows up at 8 a.m. all compress real occupancy well below the contract. Drive through a “fully leased” office garage at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday — you will see empty spaces. A lot of them.

That gap between contracted and actual is where the revenue lives.

The airlines figured this out in 1985

Airlines sell 98% of their seats on planes that depart 82% full, on average. They don’t do this by accident. They do it with three things operators of parking garages almost never have:

1. Real utilization data, not booking data. They know who showed up, not who said they would.
2. Tiered inventory. A first-class ticket has different cancellation rights than a basic-economy ticket, and the system prices accordingly.
3. A refund mechanism cheaper than the lost revenue. When a conflict happens, they bump someone with a $400 voucher on a $900 ticket and come out ahead.

A modern parking operation can do all three. Most don’t, because they’ve never needed to — the 1:1 lease has been too easy to renew.

Why +35% is conservative

Walk through the math on a conservative office garage:

• 500 assigned spaces, all leased to named full-time tenants.
• Average actual utilization across the week: 55%. (This is the number you see on real sensor data in hybrid-era office, not a model.)
• Peak-hour utilization (Tuesday–Thursday, 10 a.m.): 75%.

If you wanted zero conflict ever, you’d size against the 75% peak. That means you could sell 1/0.75 ≈ 1.33× spaces — ~665 contracts against 500 spaces — and still, at the absolute worst hour of the week, not have a conflict.

That’s +33% with zero risk. We round to +35% because the peak hour isn’t actually the binding constraint — most garages have overflow agreements, adjacent lots, or street options that absorb the tail. Once you add a modest conflict-handling mechanism — a bump fee, a next-available queue, a partner lot — you can push past +35% in theory.

In practice, the buildings we’ve deployed in run right around +35% effective oversell without contract disputes. The math says there’s more room above that. We haven’t pushed it. +35% is the number we defend with owners because it’s the number we’ve actually run.

What changes operationally

To run this, four things have to be in place. None of them are hard. All of them are table stakes the moment you stop selling spaces like it’s 1995.

1. Real occupancy data. Badge reads and access events are not occupancy. You need to know when a vehicle enters, where it parks, and when it leaves. Cameras, sensors, LPR, or gate telemetry — pick your flavor. Without this you are flying blind and +35% is indefensible.

2. Tiered inventory. Not every parker is the same. Full-time executives get guaranteed spots. Hybrid tenants get “next available by 9 a.m.” Visitors and evening users get dynamic inventory. Contracts and pricing reflect the tier. This is how you honor the 1:1 relationship for the people who need it while running +35% against the ones who don’t.

3. A pricing layer. Someone — software, not a person — needs to be setting price against demand. Tuesdays at 10 a.m. are not Fridays at 2 p.m. If your price is static, you’re leaving money on the floor in both directions.

4. A conflict protocol. When a conflict happens, what does the parker experience? A text before they arrive, a reserved spot in a partner lot, and a credit on next month. That’s the entire protocol. The cost of running it is tiny compared to the revenue it unlocks — and the parker ends the interaction feeling like the building is smart, not broken.

The objection I hear most

“My tenants will revolt the first time someone can’t park.”

Three responses.

First, if you’ve sized against the 75% peak, the conflict rate is mathematically close to zero. You’re not running airline yield. You’re running a capped oversell with a large margin of safety.

Second, your tenants are already experiencing conflict — it just looks like “the visitor lot is full” or “my contractor couldn’t find a spot.” The difference is that today the conflict is random and unmanaged. Under a real system it’s anticipated and paid for.

Third, when a conflict does happen and the parker gets a text two hours before they arrive with a spot in the sister garage and a $20 credit, the NPS score goes up. I’ve watched this happen. Parkers know the old system is broken. They notice when the new one treats them like grown-ups.

Why owners should care

At typical market rates in the cities we operate in, a 500-space garage running +35% yields in the range of $300K–$450K of incremental annual revenue with near-zero incremental cost. It’s the single highest-margin dollar in the building. And it’s sitting there, today, in almost every office asset I look at.

This is what the “Utilization” bucket in the $1/PSF math is mostly made of. Not a gimmick, not a speculation. Revenue management applied to an inventory category that has never had it.

The space is already empty at 11 a.m. Someone should be selling it.