Webinar - Unlocking Value: A Guide to Paid Visitor Parking

Welcome to today's webinar titled ‘Unlocking value: A guide to paid visitor parking’.

My name is Rebecca Woelfle, I'm a customer marketing specialist at Condo Control, and I'll be your host for this session. I'm also joined by my colleague, Adam Aronson, Condo Control Senior Director of Product Management. Today, we'll be exploring your options for visitor parking, including the paid visitor parking service.

So, before we get started with the webinar, I just wanted to provide a few reminders and housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded. A follow-up email will be sent to all registrants with the recording link once it becomes available. And then after the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. If you do have any questions, please submit them into the Zoom chat box below, and we will do our best to get to as many questions as we have time for. And then also after the webinar, upon leaving the Zoom meeting, a survey will automatically appear in your browser to gather any feedback you may have.

For today's agenda, we will first review our free visitor parking service, then the newly released paid visitor parking service, provide a demo of the self serve feature, and then answer any questions you may have in the Q&A session.  I will now pass it over to our presenter, Adam, who will begin with the topic of free visitor parking. Adam?

Hey, everybody. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be joining you today. Thank you, Rebecca. I joined Condo Control about six months back in August, as head of product, and very excited to share with you today some of the work that we've been doing over the last little bit.

So for those that are long time customers or recently onboarded, you may be aware we have free visitor parking. This was introduced about a decade back. It works on the web application. The security desk is able to create visitors, on behalf of the units. Residents are able to self serve for themselves and for their guests. And then also through the mobile app, they're able to register the guests in advance of arrival.

Over time, we've added a number of configurations adding various past allocations, and limits and so forth, and tell you a little bit more about those if you're not as familiar.

So there's several different essential permit types. One is that just generally your community operates on the idea of permits, a stay as a stay, whether it's six hours, three days, one permit is one permit.

Some of the policies of various communities might be relative to a full overnight stay.

 

Other communities may separate a day stay from a night stay. This might be in more highly trafficked areas. You have a lot of people coming to your community, that might be health care workers or others, that are kinda moving through and you're trying to keep track of everybody that's in your parking lot. And perhaps night stays are a little bit less frequent. So you're separating the day stays from the night stays.

So the configurations are, as I mentioned, quite flexible and numerous. You have the ability to set, what is the maximum number of spaces? So this is kinda helping set up that there are eight visitor parking spots for your building or there are twenty or so forth.

You may want to limit the number of permits per unit. In order to have an equitable distribution, if you've got fewer permit spaces, you may say that a unit may only be able to have two or three permits, get whatever the period is of those periods monthly weekly. They might be monthly and so forth.

And then you also can configure the expiration timing. So this might relate to, you issue permits, and the maximum stay of any given permit might be twenty four or seventy two hours, for example. Lots of different scenarios to work through. And we found that this worked pretty robustly. Last year, we issued over 1.2 million parking permits, with many communities issuing more than ten thousand permits, per year.

It serves a lot of the needs to have free visitor parking, but, as mentioned, there's also constraints on the number of spots that exist in a given community. And one way to potentially balance that is by introducing paid visitor parking.

So we've introduced this, on the web. And we've also introduced a new way for visitors to be able to register and to pay for themselves upon arriving at your community. 

So just as a quick, learning from you all, we would love to be able to have you provide us some feedback on the two following questions: Do you currently have paid visitor parking? And how many visitor parking spaces does your property have in total present? And Richard, if we can launch the poll for this, Thank you so much.

So if everybody in attendance would please provide some feedback. We would greatly appreciate it. Take just a moment with this. Great. I see the answers coming in. Thank you so much for all those participating.

Extremely helpful to understand kinda where everybody in the audience is. So we're seeing about thirty percent or so do have paid parking at the moment, and some of you may be joining more now to learn about options on visitor parking all told.

 

And then others may be, here as well to find out what would it take for the community to be able to introduce, visitor paid parking. So, appreciate everybody participating in the pool there. Really great participation. Thank you.

So, you know, why would a community choose visitor paid parking? There's a number of different reasons, security, convenience, maybe it's the possibility that you're trying to generate some revenue. And to the point that we were discussing earlier about perhaps there's limited spaces and you're trying to improve your parking management so that, parking is not concentrated by just a few units, and you have a nice fairer allocation.

And it may not take very much on a fee basis. Maybe it's a few dollars, two dollars, five dollars per permit, and you would see a greater distribution of usage by the units. Really, this is coming down to what is the best way to operate your community and how do you best meet the needs of everybody that's living there, visiting there, the circumstances for your geography and so forth.

And also having some improvement over the experience today. So, we know that often it is the case that visitors will come into a property, need to speak with the security desk,  get their permit issued, go back to their vehicle. And it's not the easiest experience, so we're gonna show you some ways that that can be improved upon.

In addition to what we were describing, with the free visitor parking, there are a few additional configurations that come with the paid visitor parking. We're using the same permit structure. But we're also introducing the idea that you can charge on an hourly rate, a flat rate and a daily rate. And these will work in conjunction with those three other permit styles in addition to the rules and the limits and so forth already in place today.

So if what you're providing are overnight passes, for example, and a unit has three overnight passes, when they go to request their fourth pass, the resident on behalf of the visitor or the visitor visiting a specific unit will be prompted to pay for that fourth visit in the period. And this can be configured on a monthly basis, on a weekly basis, and so forth, so it's highly customizable to meet the needs of your community. I'm not aware of too many circumstances and configurations that we haven't been able to address.

To give you a sense of what this looks like. The visitor registration will look fairly similar where it's new visitors coming in, these are the details of the timing, the specifics about the vehicle that the visitor will be coming with. And then, describing the arrival, the expiration, what are the fees for the parking period, and then the total amount that will be charged for the stay.

 

Residents, again, are able to do this on behalf of their visitors, and then I'm also excited to show for you a way that we've introduced that the visitors themselves would be able to do this upon arrival at their community.

So part of that demo is I'm gonna talk about QR codes. These are fairly commonplace and ubiquitous at this point. But just in case you're not as familiar with you, I just wanted to talk through this bit briefly.

When a QR code is present, a mobile phone can point at that QR code with the native camera, Apple and Android, both using just the camera feature in the current operating system, are able to read the QR image and provide you the option to open a web page directly from that QR code. And so with that, I'll now jump over to the demo of the new experience that we've introduced.

So if you set up visitor pay parking for your community and you wanted your visitors to be able to register themselves and pay for their parking upon arrival, you could print a sign something like this. Every community is gonna have a unique page where the visitors are able to set up and register for their own parking. And we can help you generate a QR code, which you can then put on your own signage.

And the idea here is this sign in your parking area is easy to use, there's no application needed, no download, but rather a visitor is able to scan the QR code and pay directly.

As I was describing just a moment ago, car pulls in, the visitor points their phone at the at the sign, and then they're brought to a web page directly on their mobile phones. And it would look a little something like this. 

So I have my browser, my desktop browser here in a mode that's simulating an iPhone. And this would be an example. So for today, I'm gonna use this example, Pleasantville Community site and let's say that I was going to visit unit 202 for example. And then I wanted to specify, I'm based here in Toronto, Ontario. And I'm gonna go ahead and register my license plate. Unit 202, we need to select from the drop down list there. I was a little bit ahead of it before. And, so we're checking in today, the 27th at 12:14 local time here. Let's say that I'm gonna be there for a day pass only today. And the make of my car is a Chevrolet Volt and that this is a blue car. And my name, it's Adam here. And then I go to checkout.

So I'm showing the parking for today as set up by this community is gonna be ten dollars for a day pass, and I'm just gonna put in my example card here. And then as simple as that, I'm going to be paid and registered for my parking permit.

 

At any point when the property management or security desk is going to check for the cars in the parking lot, these parking permits on the paid visitor parking will all be where you ordinarily encounter these in the reports and in the visitor parking permits. And so just as soon as the parking permit is issued, you're able to come and look at your parking permits report. And then to be able to see those, parking permits issued, and that the cars there belong there, to help you manage your community.

And so the parking permit, xyz789 Adam Aronson that I added just a moment ago is in the parking permits list, and it's valid for one day, until the 28th, at 2 AM, which will be the expiration that's been set for this community.

And so, all of this is working again with the benefit of being able to serve from the resident side and also introducing this new experience for visitors to be able to register themselves which we think is a helpful addition for communities, and alleviating pressure from the residents as well as from the security desk as well.

So who can use visitor parking? Visitor parking is part of the security and concierge module. If you are, on a premium package with your community, this is all available at the moment and maybe just needs to configured.

If you are on a core package, this is something that is available to you as an addition. And we'll provide contact information for your customer success manager at the end, where you'd be able to inquire if this is something of interest for you.

There's a couple other things that I would like to add in. We have been working on our user guides and with the introduction of the paid visitor parking feature, you'll notice a new article in the user guide around paid visitor parking overview, which will go through in good detail about the feature itself, as well about the signage, and we can help you with that, some video material, package details, as well as access to other guides and support to learn more about the various configuration options, and how this all works.

And the last thing that I would like to mention is the feedback forum. And so, for those of you that are aware and have been posting your ideas, thank you so much for letting us know, how does your community operate and what does your community need to be successful and drive? For those that are not as familiar, the feedback forum is an opportunity to host your ideas or to browse and upvote existing ideas. And this would be we are using visitor parking, but we're in the circumstances that are not being met by the feature, and we would like some additional options so that this could fully serve us. Our team will review all of that feedback.

 

And it's also helpful to know that many different communities are experiencing the same issue, and then we can look to solve it with as many circumstances as we understand around those challenges and pain points.

So with that, I will turn back to Rebecca for a moment. Sure. I also want to note, I'll include a link to the user guide in the post webinar email that also includes the webinar recording. So I'm sure everybody, can access that, but that concludes our presentation component for today. Thank you so much, Adam, for being our guest speaker. We will now open the floor for questions. So, if you do have any questions, please submit them in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen, please.

And, Adam, you can start answering, any of the ones that we have so far. Perfect.

So the first question, thank you, Mike, is will the unit owner be notified that a visitor has registered a visitor's spot? Yes. So you're likely familiar with our email notifications through various parts of the system, and this is another one where when a visitor comes in, and registers a spot directly in your parking lot. The unit owner and the property manager will both be notified that a new parking reservation has been made in addition to the visitor receiving a receipt directly. Great question and sorry for not letting me share that more clearly to the beginning.

Next question from Willie: how do you prevent someone not actually visiting the community from registering to use our visitors spots even though they are paying. This is a great question. Communities handle this in different ways. Sometimes there's, you know, a warning that may be placed to say, please don't park here again. And then knowing that that vehicle has done this in the past, you may take further action where you may look to have the vehicle removed from your property.

We have heard from some customers that their community is in commercial areas, and their visitor parking is very close as well as convenient. And have asked, you know, could we remove the limitation of associating visitor parking with a unit and make it more of a commercial arrangement where it's just sort of community parking for the area, not just for the building itself.

That's product development that we would need to look into. If that's, an interest by a number of communities, we could look to potentially expand the feature allowing that to be the case. Otherwise, I think it's gonna be within your bylaws in the way that you address the situation, in any sort of action or enforcement that you may lean into, as to how to deal with a vehicle that doesn't belong. Thank you again for that question.

 

How do you control and identify vehicles not registered? So the report that is provided, we'll show you the vehicles that do belong. If the vehicles that are not on the list are present, it's similar answer to where I just was a moment ago where you would look to your bylaws, and any sort of warnings or and any kinda like soft enforcement, prior to, taking a firmer actions. Which might be, towing cars away, or depending on what the way that your various cities or towns operate you may even want to get law enforcement involved, although a nice step to avoid if possible.

How does the association receive the funds and what is the cost? Thank you for the question, April. So this feature is being introduced with the Stripe payment integration. The majority of our customers are using Stripe today. We have a couple other payment providers that we would look to expand this feature if there's demand for it. Those accounts with your communities fund directly into your bank accounts. There is a transaction fee paid to Stripe, there is a convenience fee paid to Condo Control. And the bulk of the fee goes directly to your community based on the rates that you set. So every community that configures this has the opportunity to configure what the various cost should be on those permits, and the majority of the revenue will go directly to your community.

Next question's coming in from Janice. So who actually monitors the physical parking lot? That will be up to your community. What this software offering is helping with is the orchestration of the parking permits and the permissiveness of whom belongs and who has the right to be there, as well as that balance of the permits by your community.

You know, let's say that you issue 500 permits per month, you may find given, a fairly, permissive, liberal policy that say 450 or 480 of those 500 permits may be all free permits, and it's only after those are exhausted that you start to collect on the paid visitor parking.

With regards to actually scanning the parking lots, it is sometimes the role of security team members that are either on premises or maybe remotely surveying the area on your communities behalf, and they would do a stop by in your parking lot. And then we've also seen smaller communities where they don't have security that the board of directors is going and checking the parking lot, and then they deal with some of the enforcement. So they may come up with a rotation, or it might be random sweeps, or it might be just as they come and go, they check a couple license plates in the visitor parking spaces, discernment whether they belong there. And then if there's any cars that don't belong, then taking action against those.

Are the pricing structure models available or the communities have to make up their own? Thank you, Suji for the question.

 

This is really up to the communities, to determine what is the right pricing for your area and also, what are your goals? Are your goals to deal with visitors are getting you know, are not having access to a limited number of spots. And so maybe you wanna have fewer free spots and a few more paid spots.

You know, if you find that some community members are using up all of the free passes and the limited parking space, you may not have the right balance. If you have questions on this, your customer success manager can help with some feedback on this around best practices and then work through your individual situation.

Another thing that I find when I'm doing research for something like this is to just do a quick search. There's a number of parking apps, you can pull them up and see what are the rates for my area and what would be, comparable to develop something of a pricing strategy, that would best suit the needs of your community.

Next question is coming from Anna: do residents have to print the parking permit so they can place it in the vehicle? Again, this is gonna be up to the preference of your community. If we don't have easy access to the visitor parking permit report, where all of the cars are logged, maybe you rely on paper tickets, and that's the best coordination, let's say, if you have a security firm that's driving into your lot, and they need to be able to go vehicle to vehicle to vehicle and see that the cars there that it belong, or if it's more of a digital experience, you may not need to rely on parking permits and you can use the report instead to get that understanding, do various vehicles belong here, or not.

Catherine: how many spots do you need to make this system financially viable? Great question. So I think this is, a case of ‘Do you have access for the visitors, for your community?’ You know, to generate a lot of revenue, and that will that number will differ by community you know, some communities are twenty or forty units, which might only have five parking spaces versus one that has four hundred to a thousand units, then they may have 40 or 80 guest parking spaces. And, you know, higher land costs and other bits that are gonna go into this. So I'd say it's a hard one to answer in a very generalized way.

You know, as we're thinking about some of the problems that our communities are facing, we have focused a lot on ‘ do visitors have an easy time being able to park at the community?’ And if so, there's a right balance there. If not, there might be a disequilibrium between the free passes and the paid passes.

With regards to this being financially viable, I think also weighing into that would be, do you have added costs of security for enforcement, or does this end up taking extra time where you could be administering your community in other more beneficial ways. You know, I think as we see a lot of communities that don't have paid parking, it may be because they have an abundance of space, their fees cover this and it would be a perceived inconvenience to include payment. You know, all of this really needs to be right for your community. The fees work in such a way that they're added on in addition to the transaction. So what you set your fees at is what your community will be collecting. Hope that helps, Catherine.

Katrina: ‘What about parking enforcement issuing tickets?’ So I've addressed that one earlier where it's really up to your, rules and regulations, your bylaws in the way that you operate and how you want to address that. I noticed you support Stripe in the documentation. We also support Zego, which is what we use for amenities.

Peter, thank you so much for the question. You know, we've been looking for more interest in the feature. We will definitely take your question as that and look to bring Zego. You know, our intention is to have the ideal balance functionality in web, in mobile across all payment processors, and to serve all customers as robustly as possible with all circumstances. The interest that you’re expressing this is very helpful to know where our energy should go.

Janet's question is what is the cost to the corporation? So, one bit is you'll need to have the security and concierge module, which is priced for your community in the premium package or as an add-on for core. And then when you have Stripe enabled for your community, this feature configured, the economics of it will really depend on, rather the revenue generation side of this, will depend on your permit price that you set, the volume of usage, the fees that Stripe charges and that condo control charges are in addition to each transaction fee and those are not, shouldered by the community themselves. Hope, that's helpful.

Does Condo Control interface with entry gate software? Thank you for the question. Nick, Yes, we do have an integration with a company called ISS, where, if a car is in the, has a, either a resident, either their vehicle is registered or a visitor has a parking permit, the gate will recognize the license plate and automatically swing if access is permitted. If you reach out to your customer success manager, they'll be able to help you look into that a little bit more.

At our condo corp, this is coming from Philip, at our condo corp, we don't charge money for parking. However, we do require guests to register their car. Can we use this QR code without charging a fee to guest? Philip, thank you so much for the question. This is very much a similar answer to what I was describing earlier for Zego.

 

If there is an interest, I'm up with a community to pursue that, we certainly could look into this. So the sign would work very similarly with no fee pay, with no fee set up. And then you would be able to register. We don't have that option available today. We drove this development principally on the paid visitor our game use case. But we certainly could look to extend that in the future. I'd encourage you to use the feedback forum to let us know that that's a desire for your and as we look for other votes on that, we could look to extend and make that option, available to you. Thank you so much for the question.

Denise: is there a way that the unit owner can approve a visitor through the visitor pay process before they are permitted to enter? So on the self serve use case, there is not a permission aspect to this. So this would need to be a decision that your community chooses to offer this option. And, the alternative is without all residents would need to register the visitors on their behalf.

Now we recognize that there could be a bit of friction if say somebody pulls into the parking lot, and they're scanning units for free passes, for example. And so they try unit 101, and then they try unit 102, and you end up with a guest that doesn't belong to your unit, you know, that would be something that would need to be taken up with a property management, and to address that situation. We have not seen that use live in with the software. But at this point, to the, to the heart of the question, we do not have it that visitors would need to approve a visitor paying this way.

Next question coming from Alexander: our association only charges for second plus vehicles, can the system track this to determine the price for parking for each unit? Great question, Alexander. So this feature that we've been talking about is predominantly around the visitor paid parking and free visitor parking feature. What you're talking about here sounds a lot closer to work that we're doing in the asset management feature where we've heard a lot of times, you know, there are extra paid spots that might be on a monthly or a yearly based is, or an annual permit for a vehicle, for example.

And so that is actually the subject of our next webinar. I'll steal a little bit of Rebecca’s thunder, although she'll repeat that in a moment. We're gonna join you again next month to talk about, the introduction of paid assets, where you would be able to handle use cases like this. And so, tune back in as well as you can reach out to your customer success manager to describe a bit more about that. And we've been happy to talk with you and even consider early access to that feature.

Anne Bishop, next question: will registered resident’s vehicle be locked out, so they're not able to park in visitor spaces? Yes, that's the way the feature works today. We've heard this concern a lot of times people perhaps don't like their parking spot or it's the, oh, I'll just be a minute, maybe that a minute turns into some hours, and it ends up in a sort of disruptive experience in the visitor parking lot. And, and so for that purpose, registered vehicles by residents are not allowed to use the visitor spaces. Respectively, a community may want that. Again, the feedback forum would be the way to suggest that for us.

And then the last question that I'm gonna take for today, and we'll also be following up with some additional answer questions, is, do the bylaws need to be updated to switch to the paid visitor parking? Great question, Sam.

So that's one of the things during our research that we found, which is visitor paid parking is of interest, but the way that the bylaws are written today doesn't actually allow for it. And so you would need a bylaw change in order to move in this direction. So really terrific question, Sam.

You know, this is a thing where I think to some of the earlier comments I've made figuring out, how many spaces do you have? How many free passes are you giving out? What is the potential for the revenue generation and so forth.

And kinda making that sort of business case or a light business case. That would come as a proposal to the board and say, if we make this adjustment, we think these might be the outcomes for our community, and, you know, it does or doesn't make sense for our community to move into direction of paid visitor parking.

So, really great question. And something that needs to be looked into in order to deal with not only the introduction of this, but for also the adoption of this within your community.

And thank you for that, Sam. And thank you so much for the questions. I have a bunch more here. I'm gonna turn it back to Rebecca, but we are gonna follow-up with answers to the questions that were asked today. Thank you everybody.

When we send out the webinar recording, we will include a Q&A doc to answer any of the questions that weren't addressed in this session. If you have any questions or need clarification on any of the changes, please create a support ticket.

And we appreciate everyone joining us here for today's talk. Thank you so much everyone, for your time and your participation in the Q&A. Just a reminder after the Zoom meeting ends, a short survey will appear in your browser. So if you don't, mind taking the time to fill this out, we would greatly appreciate any feedback.

Alright. Have a great rest of the day everyone.