Discovering and monetizing hidden assets

The challenge

One customer in the Nordics with a diverse portfolio of real estate spanning office buildings, shopping malls, hotels, and land projects, had one large office building with connected public parking that was completely “sold out” of parking contracts. Revenue opportunities were limited since the total number of contracts matched the total number of parking places.

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Tenants needed more parking for their employees and the whole experience of arriving by car as a guest to the property was cumbersome and hard to understand. The building had ample (paid) parking spaces for guests that also tended to be unused.

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The ultimate goal was to roll out a solution to improve the occupancy of the building and demonstrate effectiveness, flexibility, revenue increase, streamlined operations and improved customer journeys for tenants and guests. Reaching these goals in the short term would be a profitable initiative. It would also prepare the owner to report emissions and energy consumption not only on the required building level, but prove increased efficiency by adding the per occupant decrease to their toolbox.

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The Solution

A landlord-controlled parking management was installed and a new parking operator contracted to operate on the landlords terms. The solution included cameras for Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), advanced digital contracts and permits for tenants and an advanced insight and analysis module among other things.

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This enabled many improvements in yield and tenant satisfaction. Just the simple fact that when tenants who arrive at work in the morning have the gate open automatically for them, was received very positively. It was like a welcoming gesture – not treating a friend as a stranger. Not having to roll down the car window to present their access card to the card reader was, in and of itself, a boost for tenant satisfaction.

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Based on the insights, the customer was able to verify that the actual utilization of the parking area was never above 62% at peak which opened for selling more contracts even at peak. There was plenty of capacity locked up in a rigid contract system.

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Step one in accessing the hidden capacity at its property was to implement free flow parking so the tenants could utilize any free space in the whole parking lot rather than being limited into a specific, signed, zone. This then enabled the customer to consider over-booking. In other industries, it is not uncommon to sell more than capacity with the understanding that day-to-day one never operates at capacity. In parking this is still surprisingly unusual.

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In addition, the customer now has the option of focusing the tenant contracts to office hours, and open up to selling evening and night contracts and permits further increasing revenues.

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The results

The initial goals of reduced administration costs and improved tenant satisfaction through self-administered contracts and permits were met, but the largest monetary gain was from increased sales of monthly contracts through overbooking.

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The increased occupancy directly affected the buildings utilization and having the historical data on actual occupancy through the ANPR data, the owner can prove better utilization in addition to the obligatory usage reporting required by businesses and landlords. Experts agree that the utilization based reporting is an obviously better metric of emissions, but regulations have held back since technology to measure this is still evolving. With Bember 360, the owner is prepared for any change, can communicate how they are improving beyond compliance.

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Add to this, the modern, digital new services to tenants, such as pre-booking of guest parking and giving the tenants the option to pay for guests parking, and the customer has a very clear return on investment across all their key criteria (reduce costs, increase revenues and improve customer satisfaction.

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The customer reports increased tenant satisfaction through automatic gate opening and better day-to-day information.

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With the new system in place, the customer has a tool for experimenting with innovative pricing mechanisms for contracts, permits and the public parking areas.

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And, critically, the people inside the vehicles are treated as the property owner's customers, or his tenants´ customers, rather than a customer of a parking operator running his own business disconnected from the primary purpose of the building.

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Conclusion

Having achieved these goals in the outside parking area, the customer is eager to look for similar opportunities inside the building using the same technology from Bember. The underutilized meeting facilities and office spaces can be optimized in similar ways, but involve integration with other of the buildings' (existing) technical systems than the parking project utilized.