Most apartment buildings provide private parking, which can be convenient for residents wondering where to park. However, parking in multi-family buildings can be tricky to manage. Property owners may face various types of parking options, such as surface lots, parking garages, and off-site lots. While each of these will help tenants avoid street parking, it’s important to have some type of system to monitor spaces. Here’s what landlords need to know.
Contents of This Article:
- Should You Assign Parking Spaces?
- How to Track Parking in Multi-Family Buildings
- Should a Tow Company Patrol Parking in Multi-Family Buildings?
- What to Do With Abandoned Vehicles
- Manage Your Rental’s Parking With Ease
Should You Assign Parking Spaces?
Assigning individual spaces to specific tenants may seem like a good idea, but this practice comes with a few problems. First, keeping track of assigned areas will take a bit of extra work. Second, when you assign certain parking spaces, you’re responsible for tenants parking in the wrong area or the wrong spot. In some cases, you can contact the owner of the vehicle in the wrong place and ask them politely to move their car.
In other cases, drastic measures such as towing may be necessary, which won’t exactly build a strong relationship with the tenant whose car was removed. Plus, it’s extremely inconvenient for the correct tenant to wait elsewhere to park their car, regardless of how quickly you work to remedy the situation.
As an experienced Baltimore property management company, we suggest having parking spots available on a first-come, first-served basis and using hangtags to identify cars that are allowed to park in that lot.
How to Track Parking in Multi-Family Buildings
Most of the time, an apartment building’s parking garage or lot is secured with a gate, which helps restrict entry by using an electronic access system. Only those who have a card, fob, or other device will gain access to the lot. This type of system also makes it easy to prevent former tenants from trying to gain access to free parking, as you can terminate these devices remotely.
However, if your building doesn’t have a garage or gate, it can be harder to track who parks where. In this case, you’ll want to establish systems to monitor the parking lot and ensure only residents or their guests, if permitted, are parking there, especially overnight. Whether it’s you or your property manager, it’s important for someone to patrol the area regularly and report unpermitted parking or contact a towing company to remove a vehicle.
It’s also important to keep track of who currently has access to the rental property parking lot using a spreadsheet or software solution like Appfolio (which can also export records into a spreadsheet format). At a minimum, track the number of spots, the full name of the person granted access to a space, the details of the vehicle (make, model, year, color), and the serial or identification numbers of the fobs or openers assigned to that person.
Should a Tow Company Patrol Parking in Multi-Family Buildings?
In most cases, using a towing company to monitor your rental property parking is a good idea–especially if the lot is not secured with a gate or garage with restricted access. That way, vehicles that should not be there can be removed before they cause problems for tenants.
That said, preventing accidental towing will be important if you choose to use a tow company. Even for lots with restricted access, provide every vehicle with a hang tag. That way, the tow truck driver can quickly identify cars that are permitted to be there. Additionally, landlords or property managers should send the company a monthly spreadsheet with all the vehicle information for permitted vehicles. Then, they can cross-reference whenever necessary.
What to Do With Abandoned Vehicles
It’s also essential to monitor the vehicles parked in the lot. There’s usually no problem with tenants who leave their cars for an extended period of time. But you’ll want to address abandoned vehicles. If a vehicle appears inoperable, send a notice to the tenant asking what the status is. In some cases, the person may simply be waiting to make expensive repairs due to finances. However, other situations may require special action.
Vehicles that are inoperable and also unsightly, perhaps due to a collision or other damaging event, are another problem. Most people will be unhappy with a busted-down vehicle taking up space in a crowded parking garage week after week. As such, it’s important to take action. You or your property management company should contact the vehicle owner. That way, you can understand what their plans are to either fix, sell, or relocate the vehicle.
For any vehicles that appear to be abandoned entirely or if the owner of an inoperable eyesore refuses to either fix or move the car, it’s important to understand the parking laws in your area. Landlords should not attempt to remove appropriately tagged vehicles, regardless of their condition. Instead, contact the local police, file a report for an abandoned vehicle, and let law enforcement take the proper actions.
Manage Your Rental’s Parking With Ease
Every landlord knows permit-only parking at a rental is a definite perk and can help get your units leased faster. Tracking and monitoring parking in multi-family buildings, on the other hand, can become a problem. For instance, if street parking and other options are limited or nonexistent in the area, the competition for parking becomes steep.
Instead, skip the hassles and leave it to the professionals. At BMG, we have experience with tenant parking, as well as every other aspect of managing a rental property. Property owners can feel confident that their properties are in the best hands possible. Contact Bay Property Management Group Philadelphia today to learn more about how we can help your rental business succeed!
