Plus providing additional casual parking for tenants

Auckland CBD's newest shopping and business centre, Commercial Bay, has recently launched Parkable to manage visitor parking. Parkable provides a seamless visitor experience through smart technology.

Each business within Commercial Bay can use Parkable to book parking spaces for their visitors. When a booking is confirmed, the visitor receives an email inviting them to park at Commercial Bay. The email contains parking details, plus access control integration enables visitors to easily access to the car park.

Commercial Bay launches Parkable

Commercial Bay, Auckland is using Parkable for seamless visitor parking experiences

Verity Credit Union has implemented Parkable at their Seattle office, to improve staff parking for both employees and their facilities team.

With 120 employees and 55 parking spots, parking at Verity Credit Union is in high demand. Prior to Parkable, staff went on a waitlist to get access, and those without a parking spot would sometimes struggle to find other parking options in the city.

For the facilities team, parking was a frustrating task as their only management tool for their two parking lots was a spreadsheet. 

“Managing the parking was inconvenient and time consuming. We were using spreadsheets, and there was no clear direction or systems for successfully mitigating issues”

“For employees, there was a long waitlist to get a parking spot. There is not a lot of parking in the Seattle CBD, so if you couldn't park at the office it was pretty challenging. We needed a solution that would be easy to manage and better for employees.”

- Nathan Foshee, Facilities and Real Estate Manager

Fair, easily managed parking with Parkable 

Nathan Foshee found that Parkable offered the perfect solution, with both an intuitive management platform and a system that provides fair access to staff parking.

“We wanted to implement a system that allowed all our employees equal access to spots at our HQ - equity is very important to us. Parkable was the perfect solution, as the interface is so easy to navigate and it allows us to fairly allocate parking between all staff who want to drive into the office.”
- Nathan Foshee

With the Parkable app, staff at Verity Credit Union can request parking on the days that they’re driving into the office. The app’s allocation algorithm then fairly distributes parking access between employees, so that everyone gets equal opportunity to park at the office.

Managing the parking lots has also become far easier, as Parkable provides tools and automated solutions for managing access, solving problems, and distributing spots. This means that Verity Credit Union no longer relies on spreadsheets, and can spend less time managing the parking lots.

However, it wasn’t only the software features that led Nathan to choose Parkable

“Along with the product, I chose Parkable because of the people behind the company - they’re very supportive, patient, and responsive. We've been working on this project for a long time, and the Parkable team feels like great friends, not just business partners.”

Verity Credit Union in Seattle launches Parkable for easy-to-manage and fair staff parking

Verity Credit Union launches Parkable

One of the best features of Parkable's parking management software is that it allows companies to make the most efficient use of all of their parking bays - even those assigned to individuals.

Often in a business, people have assigned parking bays made permanently available to them. While tremendously useful to these lucky ones, it means that when they are away - on holiday, sick leave, or working away from the office - the parking space is left empty. For businesses suffering from space scarcity - more staff members than parking spots - having unoccupied bays makes little sense, and can reinforce hierarchy in the business.

Parkable for Business allows those with assigned parking to share their bay with other staff members on the days they are away. This means more parking available to your team, more efficient use of space, and a more equitable sharing culture.

For those businesses already using Parkable for Business, this system has created significantly more available parking, which is now being fully utilised by other members of staff.

At Auckland-based Kiwi Property, the ability to share assigned bays has resulted in a 15.7% increase in the number of parking bays available. These ‘bonus bays’ have an average utilisation of 102%, meaning that on average they are used by at least one other staff member each day they are available, and sometimes more.

“The app is really easy to use - our staff think it’s great,” said Michael from Kiwi Property. “Parking space is really scarce for us, so being able to make the best use of every bay we have is one of the best aspects of Parkable. It’s the shared economy coming to our scarce resources. Now, if someone’s away from the office, their bay goes to another member of staff, and the app makes that transfer extremely easy.”

Datacom has similarly seen an increase in available car parks of 9.87%, and a utilisation rate of 93%. The business’s use of park sharing has increased revenue made from Datacom’s car parks by 18.75%, although in this case the business elects to return the revenue to those employees who share their space.

Parkable for Business also gives flexibility to businesses over how they wish to encourage the sharing of car parks, and each business has taken a different route. Kiwi Property has chosen not to charge subscription holders or casual parkers, and has simply used encouragement to motivate staff to share their unused bays.

At the other end of the spectrum, Datacom has used financial incentives to encourage the sharing of subscription bays, as those subscription holders receive the benefit when someone parks casually in their bay.

Ilona from Datacom, who has a subscription bay, said: “I’ve found that having the ability to give back my parking bay when I’m not coming into the office is easy to do via the Parkable app, but also helps other casual users wanting to use the space. This also allows me to recover that days parking costs, which is a win-win in my view.”

Car park sharing between staff

Parkable makes sharing space between co-workers easy

Sydney’s Waverley College has launched Parkable to manage its staff parking.

Prior to Parkable, Waverley College used a ballot system to allocate their parking spaces to employees. When someone didn’t receive a park in the ballot, they used street parking.

While this system was fair, it meant that whenever someone with an allocated park was on leave or away from the campus, their parking spot sat empty. Because staff parking at Waverley College is scarce, the team wanted to improve how they used the space.

Introducing Parkable to manage and share staff parking

Parkable enables easy sharing and booking of Waverley College’s staff parks. Using the app, the staff can share their allocated car park with colleagues when they’re on leave, and other members of staff can easily book and request those shared parks.

“We wanted a solution that could help us leverage better value from the parking spaces we had, and provide our staff with a way to locate unused spaces easily and simply. Parkable came along at a perfect time to assist with better management of the limited parking opportunities our staff had.”- Simon Potter, IT Manager

While changing to a new system is always a challenge, Parkable’s experienced customer success team provided engagement tools and platform training to make the transition easy.

“Parkable’s implementation was managed really efficiently and the help and guidance to get staff across the line with adopting the platform was excellent.”

Parkable enables easy sharing and booking of Waverley College’s staff parks. Using the app, the staff can share their allocated car park with colleagues when they’re on leave, and other members of staff can easily book parking.

Waverley College, Sydney implements Parkable for shareable and bookable staff parking

Parkable allows TSG to easily share 150 parking spots among 250 staff

TSG on Auckland’s North Shore has over 250 staff members and just 150 parking spots, all of which are allocated to specific employees. Staff without a parking spot are put on a waiting list, but generally that list only moves when someone leaves the business. With no other parking options close to TSG and a long public transport commute for those not living on the Shore, the system was creating difficult mornings for employees. In response, staff on the waiting list have been using the allocated parking spots of their colleagues, causing daily problems in the car park.

For Rebecca Rogers, Office Manager of TSG, resolving these parking issues was taking an hour or more of her time each day. However, Rebecca knew that parking at TSG was a problem of management, not just of scarcity.

“We never really had a system for staff parking. All of TSG’s parks are assigned to staff members, so whenever people were away, parking spots were left empty. The only way to share those parks was for people to advise the business that they would be away from the office, and often people forgot or didn’t bother.”

Yesterday, TSG launched Parkable’s software to manage their staff parking and facilitate easy park sharing between employees. With more of TSG’s employees now working from home or on flexible schedules, now is the perfect time to ensure that staff can easily share their allocated park with colleagues, and employees driving into the office can find a park.

“Parkable is making car park availability more visible to all staff as well as making it easy for staff to share parks if they are away from the office. People are already loving the ease of use.”

Parkable's parking management software allows TSG to easily share 150 parking spots among 250 staff.

TSG Auckland launches Parkable

TSG Auckland launches Parkable’s staff parking management system

Instead of pushing the usual idea that increasing your business revenue is all about creating new income streams, we had a good long think about creative practices that businesses can implement to generate extra revenue from what they already have. Below are the fruits of our labour, and they include happier employees, optimising your resources, banking on your values, and fully appreciating your existing customers.

1. Promote satisfaction in your team and see the results

As an employer, focusing on increasing happiness among your team is not only a great end unto itself, but also positively affects the overall success of your business. A great work culture helps businesses to attract and 

 and motivate a better work ethic, and it has also been found to increase profitability. In fact, companies with happy, engaged staff are 

That’s great to know in theory, but where to begin? ‘Make your staff happier’ can sound like a pretty daunting task - but there are a few simple ways to begin the journey:

 to quickly and efficiently receive feedback from your whole team.

Also remember to keep other channels of communication open, so that people feel free to tell you if they are experiencing a problem at work or have a suggestion for improvement.

Provide a basket of fruit each week for a quick, healthy snack - companies like 

 deliver fruit to your door in New Zealand, and 

Organise healthy shared lunches in the office.

Encouraging your team to get some fresh air or exercise together during their breaks.

If someone in your team has excelled or achieved an important goal, make sure that it’s acknowledged!

You can find more excellent suggestions for improving employee satisfaction 

2. Fully utilise your space and resources

One of the easiest ways to create new revenue streams is to make better use of your existing resources. 

 has found that the average company car park has between 20 and 35% of its space unoccupied during the workday, and many offices have more desk space than they currently need. Instead of having these resources go underused, why not lease them to people outside your business and make some extra income?

If you have a parking space that has spare capacity, consider using the 

 to share your extra bays with others and help you achieve some easy extra revenue. Simple to use and flexible to suit your schedule and work hours, leasing your extra parking bays can bring in revenue every month with almost no effort on your part. Pretty neat, right?

Hot desking is another easy way to immediately increase revenue, as well as bringing fresh faces (and fresh ideas) to your business. You should look for people who can bring their own unique energy and experience into your building, so that your workplace becomes more enjoyable as well as more profitable. Try 

In many industries, you will have a huge number of competitors. How do you set yourself apart from other businesses that do something similar to you? One option is to market yourself based not only on the quality of your product or service, but on your values.

 demonstrate that businesses promoting their sustainability practices and values boosts public awareness, purchasing, and customer loyalty.

Companies committed to sustainability had their sales increase by 4% between 2015 and 2016, compared to under 1% growth for other businesses.

In 2016, 66% of respondents said they are willing to pay more for sustainable products.

Sustainability can sway purchasing decisions for 45% of consumers.

Where to start? Here are a few easy steps, and the local companies that are carving out a niche by practicing sustainable and prosocial business methods.

Change all of your packaging to recyclable or compostable materials - or go packaging-free! Some inspiring examples of this are NZ’s 

Train your employees according to your values, and ask them for their ideas on how you can act on them.

Conserve water and electricity. Swap for efficient light fittings and heating, choose a power company that only uses renewable electricity, and use water-efficient dishwashers and toilets.

Put some of your profit towards a good cause. This could be an environmental group, a local project, or a charity - the 

 is a great place to start for organising regular donations.

Whether it’s your environmentalism, your support for community projects, or whatever else your business really cares about, chances are there will be other people who care too, and they’ll be thrilled to find you.

4. Make the most of the customers you have

Many businesses will be using upselling and cross-selling techniques without even knowing it, because often, it’s just a natural part of the sales process. If you’re already onto the terms, skip ahead - otherwise, here are some quick and dirty definitions.

 is when you go into a cafe to buy a sandwich and are asked, “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer the two-course lunch special?” You are being offered something more expensive than what you planned to purchase.


 is when you’re buying your sandwich and are asked, “Do you want a drink with that?” You are being offered a complementary product.

However, what it really means is making the most of the customers who are already purchasing your products or services - something which many businesses underestimate in the quest to grow their customer base. Whether your business uses these techniques consciously or not, the importance of upselling and cross-selling for revenue is huge.

 to resell to an existing customer than to sell to someone new, according to Marketing Metrics.

Increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profitability by between 

20% of your current customers will provide 80% of your business’s 

Here are some easy ways to boost your upselling and cross-selling, which could have huge impacts on increasing your revenue.

Email everyone on your customer database whenever you have an exciting new product, sale or announcement to make. Many of your customers might not be aware that you’ve launched something new, so why not reach out? Check out 

 if you don’t already use an email platform.

Look at your sales records to figure out what products or services people tend to buy together. If you find trends, you can cross-sell the products with the knowledge that they’re likely to be popular.

Make an effort to improve your customer service, and request feedback on your service from customers so you know exactly where you can improve. 

 is a good tool to use, or it could be another use for SurveyMonkey.

Increase customer engagement by creating a quarterly newsletter, becoming active on social media, implementing prize draws, and giving out ‘thank you’ coupons to show your appreciation.

Well, that’s it from us! We hope that you’ve found some positive and innovative suggestions for increasing your business revenue.

Instead of pushing the usual idea that increasing your business revenue is all about creating new income streams, check out some creative practices that businesses can implement to generate extra revenue from what they already have.

Increase your revenue with Parkable

4 innovative ways to increase revenue streams

RGF Staffing has launched Parkable’s parking management software to create better experiences for their flexible-working team, and optimise their car parks.

RGF Staffing has 19 staff parking spots in the Auckland CBD, most of which are allocated to specific members of their team. Recently, they noticed that on some days many of these parks were sitting empty.

The company always had flexible working in place, but as they continued to grow they noticed that their car parks would fluctuate between being completely full or completely underutilised on any given day, depending on which staff members were coming into the office.

They were looking for a simple solution that allowed people to continue to park easily when they drove into the office, while giving them the option to share their allocated park with colleagues when they were working from home.

General Manager Oscar Dunn explained that RGF Staffing also “have a commitment to reducing our carbon footprint and reducing unnecessary costs in the business, so leasing additional car parks wasn’t a solution we wanted to consider.”

That made a software solution the right answer for Oscar and the team. Parkable’s parking management software allows RGF Staffing employees with an allocated park to share their spot whenever they’re away from the office. This ensures that their parks don’t sit empty, and gives parking access to more members of their team.

“Parkable was the perfect solution. The technology is super simple to use and effective for managing our car parking needs.

“If you’re looking for a way to reduce your fixed costs as well as your carbon footprint, while providing a better car parking experience for your people, you can’t look past Parkable.

“Their simple tech platform has allowed us to better manage our car park requirements and share our resources across the business more effectively.”

RGF Staffing team with Parkable on launch day

RGF Staffing launches Parkable to save costs while providing better staff parking experiences

How Parkable is helping a small organisation work a little more harmoniously

It was small consolation, but when Abbie Rutlege was sick in bed, she knew her parking space was putting in a full day. Abbie runs Corporate Services at the Auckland office of APRA, the 87,000 member organisation that helps music creators get paid for their work. Ed Sheeran has ‘people’, but most musicians do not and so many rely on APRA to help them get a fair go.

The 30 people in Edwin Street, Mount Eden, are managing licensing, copyright and royalty issues for an industry that has had its business model turned upside down. They also have a big mission to encourage and nurture new talent.

So they are busy. And they only have 13 parking spaces in one of the most congested suburbs in the city; which means 0.43 spaces each for the mathematically inclined. Which means frustration, endless circling of the block and parking tickets for them.

“These issues were driving us nuts. Someone would be sick or way on business and so their assigned parking space might be free. But none of us knew and so, being polite, we continued to leave the space free whilst risking traffic wardens or paying exorbitant parking fees in Mount Eden,” said Abbie.

“Even in a small office like ours, people’s diary and business movements can’t all be tracked and so whilst we tried to manually sort this out through email and texts it didn’t really work”.

“People were having to park as far as 20 minutes walk away, and in Auckland weather that can be a damp experience, not to mention security issues after dark,” she added.

Enter Parkable. Parkable is an app that dynamically matches your parking real estate and available public parking near you with the real-time needs of your employees and customers. It has thousands of daily users amongst the public in Auckland and now businesses are turning to it to earn revenue for any empty or out-of-hours parking bays they want to rent and, more importantly, to make the lives of their employees and customers easier during the working day.

For example, parking bays that are assigned to senior staff can be made available to others when they're away from the office; staff know in advance whether there is an office park available for them, making it easy to organise alternative transport if need be; and soon, car pooling between staff will be facilitated as well.

Parkable client companies very quickly see significant increases in the ‘optimisation’ of their car parking, but more importantly, they are reporting that what was once a source of employee irritation becomes easy and stress-free. Being able to book a space a few days in advance, allows employees with, for example, family school run commitments to be sure that they can balance home and work.

“I had heard about Parkable and so gave them a call, and in no time at all we had a solution,” said Abbie.

“So when I was sick in bed that day, I was able to list my space on the App and know it would be used and help a colleague.”

“We love Parkable’s schtick. The coordination issues are taken away and you are totally part of our process now.”

“All our staff benefit and it could not have been easier to implement and people got used to it in hours,” said Abbie.

When we asked APRA employees about their Parkable experience, they said:

“It makes such a difference to my working week knowing I don’t have to drive around looking for a park every morning.”

“I love it, to be able to let my park go free and know that others will benefit without me having to gift it is fantastic.”

“There’s nothing that would make it more useful from my perspective.”

“Nothing but good things to say. Intuitive, simple, I’ve used it several times offsite.“

“My daily parking woes are solved by just a few clicks on my phone!”

“Parkable is an easy to use, massively handy app to have if you want to get about Auckland and not outlay huge sums on parking. It’s good value, I like that what I spend is going to businesses and individuals rather than big parking multi-nationals.”

“Its been great being able to book parks the previous night, so I know I have a spot in the morning and don’t have to worry.”

“Parkable has been a lifesaver. Before I was collecting parking tickets far too regularly and it was a nightmare.”

“It’s relieving to know that I’ve got a park before I leave home in the morning as it takes a lot of stress out of the start of my day. Especially after sitting in traffic for over an hour.”

“One thing I found quite helpful with having Parkable for the office was the fact you get the bay number on the app so you know where you can park. Before this someone would offer you a park but you wouldn’t always know where it was!

It’s a great service and so easy to use and means we don’t have wasted empty parks all the time like we probably often did before.”

Find out how Parkable's parking management software helps businesses like APRA, the 87,000-member organisation that helps music creators get paid.

APRA improves staff parking

APRA Mount Eden's parking woes solved

Parkable opens the Carsales car park to all staff, integrates with access control and makes payment seamless

Before Covid-19, all of the onsite car parks at Carsales’ Melbourne office were full and allocated to executives. However, once a number of staff members left the company some parking spots sat empty, and there was no system for managing those unused parks.

Carsales wanted to share those vacant parks fairly among their staff in order to improve employee happiness, remove the sense of hierarchy in the car park, and stop parks from lying empty.

However, because Carsales’ car parks sit behind access control and they didn’t want all staff to have an access card, they needed a solution that would deliver seamless, secure access to the right people. They also needed a simple way to collect payment from staff using the car park.

Launching Parkable’s car park management software

Luckily, Parkable solves all of Carsales parking issues. Using the app...

Executives can easily share their allocated park with colleagues when they aren’t driving into work

Staff without an allocated park can easily check availability and book a park in advance

Staff can easily pay for casual parking, with parking funds donated to the Carsales Foundation

Plus, Parkable integrates with Carsales’ access control. That makes it easy for staff with an allocated park or who have reserved a spot to open the access gate via the app, and provides Carsales with a secure, flexible tool for managing car park access.

“Parking was a headache that I didn’t need, so I was relieved to find a solution. Parkable ticks all the boxes for Carsales - customer support, pain-free parking, and giving fair access to all staff. I feel that we have great value alignment and I love knowing that I can just pick up the phone and ask questions of the Parkable team if I need to.”

In the first week of using Parkable, allocated parks were shared with staff over 120 times, and $450 was made through employees using those shared spaces. That revenue is then donated to the Carsales Foundation, which allows the company to build funds toward workplace improvements.

Plus, staff are happy to have a solution:

“Parkable is a neat, intuitive app that makes securing a park seamless and easy!”

Before Covid, all of the onsite parks at Carsales’ Melbourne office were full and allocated to execs. However, once a number of people left the company some parks sat empty, and there was no system for managing them - until Parkable.

Carsales launch Parkable

Carsales Melbourne launches Parkable to fairly manage car park access

Fairly distributing 26 parking spots between 70 employees

 has its head office in Ellerslie, where they have 70 staff members and 26 parking spots. Since most of their parks are allocated to specific employees, many in the SecureCom team were missing out.

SecureCom wanted to use their parking space more efficiently, by allowing staff with an allocated park to share it with their colleagues when they’re out of the office.

With the Parkable app, parks are easily shared by SecureCom employees, and the rest of the team can check parking availability and reserve a park for the next day. Parks can be used efficiently, and shared fairly among staff.

Tracey Goldstine, Head of Office & Culture and the project lead for implementing Parkable, said: “Car parking is often an emotive subject, so anything that we can do to make our car parks more accessible to our team is going to be a positive.”

“The onboarding of Parkable to the SecureCom team has been super streamlined. The Parkable crew have been incredible, answering any of my questions so quickly and providing comms to be sent out, has made the transition to this car park management system so easy.”

SecureCom has launched Parkable to use their parking space more efficiently. With the Parkable app, SecureCom staff with an allocated park can easily share it with their colleagues when they’re out of the office.

Parking management software

SecureCom has launched Parkable to share allocated parks between staff

Tauranga is undergoing significant expansion, which puts pressure on the city’s parking space.

Priority One, Tauranga’s economic development agency, is trialing Parkable for Business as a solution for the city’s car park shortfall. According to Mark Irving, Project Lead of the Parkable trial, Tauranga is currently undergoing a significant transformation and expansion, which has put more pressure on the city’s parking space.

Parkable for Business provides a solution by enabling businesses and organisations to fully utilise their car parks via bay sharing. Priority One is sharing its parking bays with individuals from other organisations whenever the space isn’t required by their own staff.The three other businesses trialing Parkable in Tauranga - Jigsaw Architects, Findex and Property Managers Group - are also implementing bay sharing between their staff and with selected individuals from other organisations.

“The Parkable technology has enabled multiple people to share existing leased bays. Most leased bays are not 100% occupied by the tenant and therefore the opportunity exists to allow the general public to use these bays when unused by the original tenant. Parkable has an awesome product, Parkable for Business, that allows this to occur.”
- Mark Irving, Project Lead

Using Parkable, Priority One hopes to make better use of the city’s parking space and attract more people to Tauranga. Their belief is that the trial is a great demonstration of what the entire city can do to better utilise resources.

“The sooner everyone adopts the Parkable app, the more efficient parking will be in Tauranga. It’s straight forward, progressive, user-friendly and above all, it works."
- Mark Irving, Project Lead

Priority One, Tauranga’s economic development agency, is trialing Parkable for Business as a solution for the city’s car park shortfall. Tauranga is undergoing significant expansion, which puts pressure on the city’s parking space.

Commercial Bay, Auckland is using Parkable for seamless visitor parking experiences

Plus providing additional casual parking for tenants

Suggested articles

Interested in improving your visitor parking?