Parking with no one watching it leaks 10% to 25% of its revenue

Propmodo, in a piece quoting Shareena Sandbrook, chief commercial development officer at Towne, lays out the usual arrangement: leasing and maintenance each get a team, while parking gets a vendor contract, a rate sheet that hasn't changed in years, and whoever spots the problem when something stops working.

Propmodo puts revenue leakage, the gap between what a parking operation should collect and what it actually does, at 10 to 25 percent at properties without active monitoring. Underpricing alone costs the average multifamily property about $100,000 a year in missed net operating income. Neither loss shows up as a problem, because nobody is producing the report that would reveal it.

For an asset manager or a VP of property operations, the real question is what has shifted to make going after that money worth paying for a contract or a salary. The answer is that the technology no longer just carries out tasks. It now finds money. Automation lowered the cost of running parking, and AI is making it more productive.

From cheaper to run to smarter to price

Enforcement now runs on license plate recognition, collection runs through mobile payment, and gateless entry removes the equipment that once required an attendant close by. Automation has largely eliminated the staffing needs that used to make dedicated parking management costly.

The second stage is the newer one. Sandbrook describes AI doing analysis that property teams never had time for: predicting utilization, suggesting prices and running competitive comparisons. She adds that some leakage always goes unnoticed when no one is specifically assigned to manage it.

Pricing is where that analysis turns into money. A pricing engine can read signals the property doesn't generate itself, such as local event schedules, competitor rates, weather forecasts and seasonal patterns, and adjust far faster than a manager reviewing rates once a quarter. The goal Propmodo cites is 85 to 90 percent utilization, full enough to capture demand without turning away the last few customers. The piece doesn't publish the model behind that range, so it's best treated as a working rule of thumb, not a calculated optimum for every type of property.

In a fairly short time, dynamic pricing has shifted from something unfamiliar to something people expect. When her team first started, Sandbrook says, nobody really understood surge pricing, and customers are now far more comfortable with the concept.

Rates that move with demand, time of day or local conditions once had to be explained to every customer who ran into them. Propmodo credits ridesharing and travel with doing most of that education before parking operators had to. That suggests the customer-relations cost of retiring a fixed rate sheet is lower in 2026 than it was when Sandbrook's team began: the driver arrives already used to prices that move.

Parking Guidance Systems, which sells guidance hardware and analytics, makes a similar case in its own April 2026 material. In the company's view, a single flat rate caps what an operator can earn when demand peaks and pushes away price-sensitive drivers when things are quiet. It recommends dynamic pricing instead, of the kind airlines and hotels use. Its example: when data shows a facility hitting 90% capacity during recurring events, rates can shift automatically to track demand, and lower prices during slow stretches can bring in additional users.

That 90% trigger sits at the top of the 85 to 90 percent band Propmodo cites. A vendor and an operator landing in roughly the same place suggests a shared working view of when a garage is full enough to reprice, even though neither range is a proven optimum.

Guidance, enforcement and the eight-minute garage

Parking Guidance Systems also points to a lever that has nothing to do with price. It describes a garage where the lower decks jam while the upper decks go underused. According to the company, many organizations decide they need a new structure as soon as parking reaches capacity, even though the data often tells a different story. Its answer is guidance equipment, including digital signage and LED indicators, that steers drivers toward underutilized sections. The company says that when demand is spread more evenly, a facility can take in more paying customers without new construction.

On enforcement, the vendor contrasts random patrols, which waste labor hours and let unpaid vehicles go undetected, with smart cameras and sensors that flag unpaid or overstayed vehicles and send officers straight to them. The promised result is less time spent patrolling empty aisles and more citation revenue without a bigger payroll. That maps directly onto Propmodo's definition of leakage: a car that parks without paying is money the property should collect and doesn't, and a random patrol only samples the garage rather than counting it. Those are the vendor's descriptions of what its products can do, not measured results.

Speed matters as well, though its payoff lands in another budget. Propmodo calls it a revenue lever of its own in some asset classes. A retail center where it takes eight minutes to find a space and get out of the garage has turned shopping time into waiting time, and the tenant whose sales suffer is the one paying rent.

Quicker entry and exit won't appear on the parking P&L. The benefit appears in the center's performance. For a retail owner, that means the case for guidance and faster gates could be made on tenant sales as much as on parking receipts, which matters when the parking line alone looks too small to justify the spend.

What a few hundred thousand dollars is worth

According to Sandbrook, the extra revenue can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars and, depending on cap rates, can noticeably lift a property's value. Propmodo notes that the sums tend to surprise owners who have treated parking as infrastructure. Parking income is typically capitalized at somewhere between 5 and 10 percent, which is why, as Propmodo points out, adding a few hundred thousand dollars of lasting annual NOI can shift a valuation by millions.

Where a property sits in that range matters almost as much as the income. The same parking dollar supports twice as much value at a 5 percent cap rate as at 10, so owners of assets that trade at lower cap rates would see the largest valuation effect from the same operational fix.

Propmodo's own wording is durable annual NOI, and durability is the part a buyer or lender will question. For owners whose valuation is about to be tested in a sale or refinancing, the timing of a parking review could matter as much as what it finds.

None of it requires a shovel. Propmodo's point is that this math applies at properties where the garage is already built and the cars are already arriving, which puts it in a different category from value-add plans that start with construction.

Cities are finding the same gap at the curb

Municipal parking is getting the same scrutiny for a blunter reason. Writing in Parking & Mobility in June 2026, Sam Warnecke describes city budgets squeezed between rising costs for essential services, infrastructure maintenance and climate adaptation on one side, and slowing tax revenues and unpredictable federal support on the other. Yet many municipalities still treat parking as routine maintenance. With disconnected payment apps, legacy meters and fragmented enforcement, he argues, a city's most valuable public real estate is often its most underperforming revenue source.

For most cities, Warnecke says, meter data lives in one place, mobile payments in another, permits in a third and citations in a fourth. Staff stitch spreadsheets together to answer basic questions, such as where demand peaks, which blocks turn over fastest or how many violations go unresolved in a typical month. Leaders can't say with confidence what the curb should earn, let alone how much they're missing.

The first figure is starker than it looks: in that capital city, unpaid violations on the books run to more than double a year's ticket collections. Warnecke counts the cost in services delayed, projects scaled back and residents asked to carry more of the tax burden. Those backlogs are accumulated balances set against one year's revenue, so they aren't a like-for-like match for Propmodo's 10 to 25 percent leakage rate. They do point at the same failure, though: money owed that no system is chasing.

Warnecke reads the spread in per-space revenue as a sign of misaligned pricing and policy, not weak demand. Underpriced curb space in busy districts encourages long stays and circling, he writes, while pricier garages a block away sit underused. The compliance figure, from Urban Freight Lab research he cites, is attached to unified platforms that pull meters, apps, permits and enforcement into one dashboard.

Those platforms, he writes, let leaders spot overused blocks in minutes rather than months, then match rates to peak hours and pilot test zones, while cutting administrative overhead. The fragmented alternative leaves compliance depending more on chance than on clear policy.

Cities and landlords are different owners with different rules, but the mechanism is the same: revenue goes missing in the gaps between systems and goes unseen in the gaps between people. The city version also makes the order of operations plain. Unified data comes first, and the pricing and enforcement changes follow from it, much as Sandbrook ties recovered leakage to having someone specifically assigned to look for it.

Where the playbook bends

Automation doesn't fit everywhere. Sandbrook separates the properties where technology covers the whole job from those where it doesn't, and puts healthcare in the second group. Someone pulling into a hospital garage is often having a hard day, and a kiosk is a poor substitute for a person.

Older properties face a different obstacle: upfront spending on equipment and software, set against a revenue stream the owner has never counted on. Sandbrook says most of those properties get there through third-party arrangements, which let an owner see results without putting up much capital. Once the revenue appears, she says, owners are usually ready to invest more.

For most people, parking is also where a visit to a building begins and ends, so it would matter to operations even if it brought in no revenue. In Propmodo's view, the properties succeeding on both fronts no longer hand parking to a contractor and forget about it. At any building, the earliest sign of that shift is simple to check: whether someone now produces the report that would reveal the leak.