How the Sharing Economy is Rapidly Changing How Large Groups of Vehicles Park
Ruth Goodwin
If you only have one car, parking is a pretty simple prospect. At night it lives in your driveway or garage, and during the day it sits in a space near your place of work. And if you happen to go to the mall or to visit family, most likely there is an available space for you to stash your ride for a few hours.
But what if you have five cars? Or 20? Or 100? All of a sudden, life gets more complex in a hurry. Fortunately, there are a number of flexible options that allow owners of automotive fleets to arrange and manage parking without having to go full-on Jay Leno and build their own garages.
One of the major issues with managing fleets is variability. For example, New York is typically swamped during the summer season as tourists from all over the world come to town. Surprisingly, car rental agencies are inundated with requests for vehicles, and typically have thousands of cars available. This makes a lot of sense in July and August, but by November demand decreases and some fleets or vehicles can sit idle until the spring thaw. Parking all of these cars, and keeping them safe from the elements, is a major problem.
What if there was a way to store an entire fleet for long stretches of time without having to own and operate a fully winterized lot? This is where the sharing economy can make a massive difference and improve the bottom line for companies facing storage issues.
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Contact one of our dedicated team members today.
As it turns out, there are hundreds of hotels in the New York area, and many of them are fairly empty during the winter. And many of them have an indoor parking lot. It’s a perfect match of increased need and excess inventory – which is the exact problem that WhereiPark was created to solve. Using our platform, hotels can make their spaces available, and rental companies can lease them for as long as they need to. There are very few true win-win situations in life, but this is one of them.
It's not just rental car companies that can benefit from this kind of synergy. Because parking is at a premium in most cities, while at the same time there is abundant excess inventory (that many just don’t know about). In fact, there is so much extra space that experts estimate that there are eight parking spaces for each car in the United States! It’s no wonder that cities like Dallas are actually looking to amend their codes to reduce the amount of parking that needs to be included in new construction projects. After all, most of these policies were adopted during the car-heavy 1960s.
This shift to different forms of transportation has also created a perfect environment for operators of vehicle fleets to take advantage of the sharing economy and find affordable, convenient places to put their vehicles. This includes government agencies that operate thousands of cars (ranging from police cars to repair trucks) to car dealerships to construction companies that need to find spaces for workers for months or years at a time. It’s even an ideal solution for car clubs that require classic vehicles to be safely stored and kept away from bad weather.
Owning a lot in an urban area is prohibitively expensive today, and many city parking structures are getting razed in favour of more profitable high rises and office blocks. Relying on the sharing economy to find spaces in nearby buildings, owners of fleets can fundamentally change the economics of their businesses and eliminate excess costs and administrative headaches that come along with managing their own parking facilities. It really is that easy.
Looking for 10+ spaces for your fleet?
Contact one of our dedicated team members today.
Edward Moon is a Growth Marketer at WhereiPark, a technology company that enables multifamily, residential, and commercial property owners to discover new revenue sources through innovative solutions that leverage unused parking spaces.