Condo owners renting out parking spaces Airbnb-style
Crain's Chicago Business
By Dennis Rodkin
07 December 2016

A unit owner in this River North building uses an app to rent out his two parking spaces.            Photo by Dennis Rodkin

Brandon Arnold walks ten minutes to work from his River North condo and doesn't have a car, so he doesn't need the two parking spaces that came with it.

But other people do.

Using an app developed in Chicago, Arnold rents one of his spaces to a woman who keeps a car downtown for weekend use, and the other to a man who parks during working hours Monday to Friday. On weeknights and weekends, when that latter space is empty, Arnold occasionally rents it to people coming to the neighborhood to shop or dine.

makes about $400 a month

Arnold, who's in banking, makes about $400 a month on what he says would otherwise be "wasted real estate. It's getting me money for space that I was doing nothing with," Arnold said.

He's one of about 500 Chicago condo owners renting out the parking spaces they own but don't use via ParqEex, a peer-to-peer marketplace for parking. ParqEx is essentially an Airbnb for parking spaces, in which unused assets are offered online to users.

"It's free money," said Caleb Stephenson, who with his girlfriend, Ashley Hofmann, rents out the parking space that came with their Fulton Market district condo.

About 8,000 Chicago-area parking spaces are listed on ParqEx, according to CEO Vivek Mehra, who founded the company in mid-2015. Most are part of commercial real estate portfolios, but 600 belong to condo-owners. (Like Arnold, some of the 500 owners have more than one space.)

Stephenson, who works in IT, and Hofmann, who works for a non-profit association, both get around via foot and Divvy bike. They have no need for a car, but when they bought the one-bedroom condo on Fulton Street in 2013, he said, they recognized that "it will be easier to resell if it has a parking space," so they held onto it.

After a few years the pair realized they had a valuable asset that wasn't providing them any benefit, so they started trying to rent it out on Craigslist. It didn't go well. "I felt like the people who came were a little shady," Stephenson said. "I had to ask them to bring me cash or checks because PayPal can be trickier."

Eventually they found ParqEx, which handles all the details, and since December 2015, the couple's space has been rented by monthly users, most recently a woman who's had it for six months and parks during the workday. She pays $250 a month. The homeowners clear $215 after paying a service fee to ParqEx. The stated fee is 20 percent, but has been negotiable.

Nobody knows how many condo parking spaces sit unused, but in a study of spaces in apartment buildings released last March, the Center for Neighborhood Technology found that on average, one-third of off-street residential parking is empty at night.

ParkEx "is a demonstration of how parking could be better utilized," said Kyle Smith, the study's author. Now an independent consultant, he has no affiliation with ParqEx. Different groups–commuters, shoppers, residents–have different parking needs, Smith said, but "historically, we've built parking spaces for each of those different functions, and you really only need one."

For the parking tenant, Stephenson said, "my space is better than being in some parking garage, because she gets a dedicated space in a heated garage."

condo boards cooperate

Mehra said the technology in the ParqEx app can open nearly all condo buildings' garage doors or gates, but it requires installation of a piece of hardware on the door or gate. So far, no building's homeowner board or management company has declined to allow installation, he said. "Our technology is more secure than what they have there today," he said.

Arnold said he provided a copy of his ParqEx lease agreement to his building's management company, "and that was fine, as long as they knew who to contact in an emergency." He suggested that renting out condo parking spaces wouldn't be upsetting to other residents as renting condos or apartments on Airbnb can be.

Two reasons: most condo parking garages are accessed separately from the residential hallways, so residents won't interact with space-renters. And "people might rent your condo for the weekend and party the whole time, but nobody's going to stay in your parking space to party," Arnold say. "They're gone in a few minutes."

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