Vend Park Revolutionizes the Parking Garage, Increasing NOI for Owners

At a time when virtually every industry is progressing thanks to technological advances, the average parking garage has remained stubbornly unchanged. Cars pull up to a gate, take a ticket, and proceed from there, initiating manual processes at every step.

Vend Park, a vertically integrated parking management and payments technology company, has finally modernized the parking garage, automating every aspect of the garage experience for drivers and property teams alike. This spells the end of the traditional parking garage ticket, and higher net operating income for owners.

“Our platform digitizes all aspects of parking including parking garage access, payment processing, monthly parking billing, reporting, accounting and customer support,” said Michael Miele, Vend’s co-founder and CEO. “We then use our platform to manage a parking location all the way down to understanding tenant leases to make sure those charges are occurring correctly. We essentially do everything except clean the garage, perform maintenance and provide security. Everything else is handled by our platform. ”

Vend allows tenants to manage the entire parking experience from their phone. Payments, validations and spot reservations all happen on the web app, which offers seamless interactions with other parking apps like SpotHero or ParkWhiz. And instead of issuing standard monthly passes, flexible passes, known as FlexPass, automatically manage spots in a way that optimizes their use, especially applicable for tenants with employees not coming to the office five days a week.

For owners, the entire parking operation is managed in an automated cloud-based dashboard that offers over 40 real-time data points for every parking transaction, and decreases back-office manual operations. 

The system is already reaping major dividends for Vend’s customers.

One of their clients in San Diego is a 360,000-square-foot office building with a covered and gated parking garage with 314 spaces. After struggling with an awkward paper ticket system that was often used inaccurately, the building switched to Vend. The system took just a week to install, and the result was a 75 percent reduction in time spent on validation billing and audits, 133 hours of parkers’ time saved per month, and a 42 percent increase in transient parking revenue.

For Park 88, a luxury residential property in Bellevue, Wash., located near a slew of high-end retail, equipment in their garage was frequently breaking down, resulting in poor tenant experience and lost revenue.

Last October, the owner, Pacific Crest Real Estate Advisors, introduced Vend’s Digital Access & Revenue Control Smart Parking Platform, which handled validations, monthly and daily parking, real-time reporting, and both license plate recognition and QR code entry and exit. 

The results have been stellar, including a greatly improved parking experience for tenants and retail customers alike, and real-time visibility into the parking operation for the owner and operator.

“As a real estate company, we are leaning on technology to drive efficiencies operationally and for our tenants/visitors,” said Joy Campbell, asset manager at Pacific Crest Real Estate Advisors. “We also rely on data to power smart decision-making. The more data we have at our fingertips, the faster we can implement changes that drive NOI growth and a better experience. Vend directly aligns with our mission to embrace technology to drive company growth.”

In addition, Vend provides high-level support that ensures satisfied users in the face of any issues that might arise.

“Support is one of Vend’s best features,” said Nick Lorisch, superintendent at Park 88. “Vend takes over customer support and it is truly white glove. They interact with customers, taking care of refunds and any other questions. They are extremely prompt, and there have been many visitors who have reached out to tell us how well support was handled.”

Miele notes that with all of the Vend platform’s game-changing capabilities, it helps owners unlock the true value of their facilities.

“A parking consultant I know once said that no parking garage has the correct pricing at any exact moment in time, and the reason is that there’s not enough science going into pricing. It’s a market-based calculation based on 12 or 15 garages nearby,” said Miele. “There’s a lot of room to be smarter on pricing including doing a better job understanding utilization, like who’s entering and leaving a facility at different times of the day, to help us charge a price that makes sense for that user. So unlocking a garage’s true value is about using more utilization data to price smarter.”

Much of Vend’s advantage also revolves around smarter space utilization, which can potentially increase a garage’s revenue by 60 to 70 percent, in part by helping garages drive demand.

“FlexPass allows parking locations to clear their waitlists, allowing more people access to the parking facility,” said Miele. “We’re integrated with a number of third-party aggregators which we can dial up or down based on the need to drive more eyeballs to a parking location. There are also techniques to integrate into Apple Maps or Google Maps so a location can be searched, found, navigated to, and accessed all through one seamless experience on your phone.”

New Vend customers go through an eight-week onboarding process including training all parking employees on the new system, and integrating existing data into Vend. The actual installation takes about a week or less, and customers usually start seeing increased revenues within the first month.

Miele also emphasizes that Vend provides comprehensive data reporting to customers based on their specific needs.

“It’s the asset management of parking,” said Miele. “If a customer’s parking revenue was down, our operations team can build them a report showing, for example, monthly parking utilization by employer, or a Thursday-over-Thursday comparison for the last month. We can provide information on everything from utilization to revenue to occupancy, to name just a few criteria. What’s important to know about data is that for all these buildings, Vend is essentially integrating into their systems to freely and automatically pass data to them so that they have all the data they could want.”

While Vend currently enjoys a unique position as an innovator in the parking management space, Miele believes that this is the beginning of the end overall for the paper ticket, and the dawn of a new age of technology-driven partner management in the parking sphere.

“Parking management and technology are really fusing together, and we’re going to see a major shift away from paper tickets and toward digital transactions,” said Miele. “Five years from now, we are going to be competing in a world of other companies that have chosen this path.”