For most developers, parking expenses are filed away as a cost of doing business, a fixed line item required to support the real estate around it. On the latest episode of Inside CRE, CREDA President and CEO Marc Selvitelli, CAE, sat down with Sean Glavin, chief technology officer, and Morgan Hurley, chief revenue officer at HAH Parking, to make the case that this assumption is outdated and, in many cases, costing owners real money.
HAH Parking built its platform around a simple premise. “We started with the idea that [parking] is already a business that’s generating revenue for lots across the country,” Glavin said. “When you introduce it as a technology-first solution, you remove a lot of the logistical overhead, and that allows any owner, investor or developer with a parking component to monetize it and roll it into their pro forma.”
For the customer, the company relies on a text-to-pay and QR code system rather than gates, meters or kiosks. Hurley put it simply: “The best parking experience is the one you quickly forget.” That ease of use, he added, cuts both ways: making it simple to pay also makes it simple to keep paying, which reduces the need for enforcement.
One of the more counterintuitive points in the conversation was Glavin’s take on occupancy. Conventional wisdom holds that a full lot is a successful lot. HAH Parking argues the opposite. “A full lot is a failing lot,” Glavin said. “The moment somebody takes that last available space; you can’t sell passes anymore until somebody pulls out.” Rather than chasing full occupancy, he recommends dynamically pricing the last available spaces so high that the lot stays just short of capacity, capturing the maximum revenue the market will bear.
The revenue impact, according to Glavin, can be significant. He pointed to case studies showing uplift ranging from 30-40% at the low end, with some properties seeing triple-digit gains, including one lot that grew from roughly $800,000 to $2.2 million in annual revenue after adopting dynamic pricing.
Hurley also pointed to the operational cost of legacy systems. Gated lots with attendants create friction for drivers entering and exiting, and that friction carries a cost. “Anytime you add friction to any high-demand, high-transient parking lot, they’re just going to go to the next lot and go past it,” he said. Glavin added that gates and kiosks carry significant capital expense and downtime risk: when a gate fails, revenue stops until it is repaired. A cloud-based system, he noted, keeps uptime above 99% without that exposure.
So what should developers actually be asking when they evaluate a parking asset? Glavin recommends looking past the top-line NOI to the number of transactions, the average revenue per transaction, whether pricing is dynamic and how enforcement is handled. For unmonetized lots, location matters most: walkability, nearby restaurants and retail, and whether adjacent uses would exclude the lot from being a good fit, such as an anchored strip center with excess parking already built in.
Looking further out, Glavin sees artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles reshaping the category again, from faster product development to vehicles that will eventually need to stage somewhere when they are not actively in use, creating new opportunities for lots designed to serve them.
Listen to the full conversation on Inside CRE and find more detail in HAH Parking’s Development Magazine article, “What Makes a Parking Asset Actually Perform.”
This post was created with the assistance of AI tools; all content was reviewed by the author.
