The car park nobody can reconcile
On a business park, the car park is often as contested as the buildings. Some tenants have spaces in their lease. Some pay for extra spaces under licences agreed by email years ago. One tenant has been using six spaces that belong to a vacant unit. Permits are paper hangers, some of them expired. The site team does not know who should be where.
A new tenant signs for a unit with eight spaces. The site manager tries to allocate them and finds all the nearby bays already in use by someone.
Why parking drifts
| Source of parking rights | Where it is recorded |
|---|---|
| Spaces in the lease | Lease plan and rights clause |
| Extra spaces by licence | Licence document or an email |
| Informal arrangements | Nowhere |
| Visitor and contractor spaces | Site team's knowledge |
| Spaces for vacant units | Not managed |
Parking rights are a mix of legal rights and commercial arrangements. What each tenant is entitled to is for your leases and advisers. The operational picture is what goes wrong.
Change on the park adds to the drift over time. Tenants merge units, give back part of their space, or take an extra unit next door, and the parking arrangements are rarely revisited at the same moment. Each change leaves a small mismatch between what the paperwork says and who parks where.
What the muddle costs
Licence fees for extra spaces are not billed, or billed at old rates. Tenants dispute each other's use of spaces. New tenants cannot be given the spaces they were promised. Enforcement, where you use it, is inconsistent because the site team does not know who is entitled. And parking, which can be a useful income stream and letting incentive, is not managed as either.
Parking is also one of the first things a prospective tenant asks about on a business park. If the leasing agent cannot say with confidence which spaces come with a vacant unit, and whether more could be licensed, the answer is a vague promise that later turns into a dispute with whichever tenant has quietly been using those bays.
The parking register we build
- Every space on the site is recorded, with a map, and marked as demised, licensed, visitor, contractor or unallocated.
- Rights under leases are recorded from the lease plans and clauses, and licences are recorded with their terms, fees and end dates.
- Informal arrangements are recorded as such, so they can be formalised or ended by your team.
- Permits are issued digitally per vehicle registration against the tenant's entitlement, and tenants manage their own registrations within that number.
- Licence fees are billed on schedule through your accounts system, with reviews and end dates flagged.
- The site team gets a current list or a phone lookup of registrations and their entitlements, for checks and enforcement if you use it.
- When a unit becomes vacant, its spaces show as available for licence to other tenants.
If you use a camera-based car park system, the register can supply the permitted registrations to it.
How the site runs after
Every space has a status and a holder. New tenants are allocated the spaces they are entitled to. Licence income is billed and reviewed. The site team knows who should be parked where. And vacant units' spaces become income rather than a free-for-all.
Disputes between tenants also get simpler. When one tenant complains that another is using its bays, the site team can check the registrations against the register in a minute, rather than escalating to the asset manager.
Is your car park like this?
- You are not sure who is entitled to which spaces.
- Licence fees for extra spaces are not billed consistently.
- Informal parking arrangements exist that nobody recorded.
- Paper permits are out of date.
- Tenants dispute each other's use of spaces.