Whether you’re a regular downtown commuter or an occasional city driver, finding a reliable long-term place to park your car in a big city can be a struggle.
It was exactly this problem that inspired Alex Enchin and Jeremy Zuker to found WhereiPark, an online marketplace that helps companies and commuters reserve monthly parking spaces. Having collaborated on a number of technology ventures together since 2009, the two entrepreneurs came up with the concept of WhereiPark over a breakfast meeting after a poor experience trying to find a monthly parking spot in downtown Toronto. Founded in 2014, the company now operates in hundreds of parking locations across Canada and the United States.
When condo and apartment garages have empty parking spaces, WhereiPark provides the property owner with the opportunity to rent the spot out to monthly non-resident drivers or local companies. This allows the building to generate revenue on spaces that would otherwise sit vacant. The same service is also available to new construction developers with their own parking garages which are typically ready to use before residents move in.
Livabl sat down with Enchin and Zuker to learn more about how WhereiPark helps new construction buildings generate revenue even before the first residents settle in.
Parts of this interview have been edited or removed for clarity and brevity.
Livabl: WhereiPark was founded in Toronto in 2014. How has the company grown and expanded over the years?
Alex Enchin: We spent quite a while focused on Canada, which in some ways was a challenge because Canada has not traditionally been an apartment market, a multi-family market. It’s been much more of a condo market and a lot of the apartments are actually just condos that are rented out by owners or groups. It was definitely a challenge because when you look at a city like Toronto versus a city of similar size like maybe Houston or something, there’s hundreds or maybe even a couple thousand, multi-family buildings in a city like Houston. In Toronto, at least in the core of the city, there’s not that many true rental buildings.
So it’s definitely a challenge, but we were able to partner with companies like Timbercreek Communities, Realstar, Medallion and MetCap that saw the value in what we were doing, and launched pilots at those properties and were able to create revenue for them, and they were generally really happy with our program. It was predominantly renting spots to people who were working in that area around Yonge and Eglinton or Yorkville, in some cases, in CityPlace or a little west of that. Liberty Village was an interesting spot for us; Yonge and Lawrence; some stuff out by King East and by St. Lawrence Market. We were able to demonstrate to some of these property owners that we could rent out spaces and create new revenue. We started to add some buildings in Montreal and Ottawa, and it just kind of felt like the real opportunity was in the US because of the apartment model.
I had met somebody at a Canadian apartment industry conference who is from Denver, and he sort of said, ‘This is really smart and nobody is doing this in the US. You guys should really sort of do this in the US.’ We did more research on the US market and it just seemed like a no-brainer given how much more of their rental market is true apartment buildings.
I started traveling to the US and going a lot to these conferences and tradeshows and got invited to speak at a couple. Really quickly, everyone I met was like, ‘Wow, this is a great idea. I have this lease-up building in Seattle…’ or ‘[I have] this stabilized community in San Diego and we have all of this empty parking, we don’t know what to do with it.’
We launched in the US in February 2017. We started in Seattle and got a couple of apartment communities and a couple [of] ownership groups signed up. What we found is that [in] the US, people are a bit more aggressive there and they’re more willing to try new ideas. We found some groups in Canada, especially some of the more institutional owners, [are] pretty slow and deliberative in wanting to talk about things for a very long time. In the US, a lot of the companies were really a lot more willing to try things and give us a building or two and see how we perform. They seem to be more receptive to entrepreneurial ideas there. That’s basically four years ago almost to the day. Fast forward to now, we have about 330 communities in the US.
L: Give me the elevator pitch for how WhereiPark helps new construction and lease-up buildings generate revenue?
AE: We partner with owners and managers of apartment communities. It would be new construction lease-ups, is the US term, or stabilized communities, and we take an allocation of parking spaces and we rent them to commuters and/or to companies who have offices nearby to use as monthly parking. WhereiPark handles all of the administrative and logistical aspects of the program, that is sourcing these parking contracts. We do handle payments and security deposits, [we] handle customer support. In the US, we’re required to do background checks on the parking customers before they get access.
For the apartment communities, we also handle all of the financial reporting and it’s all done on a performance basis. These communities that list with us, they don’t have to pay a fee or assume any kind of financial risk to use our program. It’s all sort of upside.
L: At what point in the new construction building process can WhereiPark get involved?
JZ: There’s a few scenarios. One is if it’s just a single building, and then the other scenario is different phases. And so, [in] the construction project and the project itself, there’s phase one, phase two, phase three and they continue. As you know, the first thing that they’ll build is the garage, underground usually. It’s theoretically possible that this could happen quite early on, but it’s usually around the time when the building is either ready or almost ready for people to start moving in.
In the case of a multi-family building where they’re getting into their lease-up phase, they’ll complete the building or most of it and it’s essentially vacant. The sales team has started to rent out apartments, and some people start to move in, but what’s for sure is that as people are looking at it, and depending on the market situation and where it is and how fast people move in, what’s for sure is there’s going to be a tremendous amount of extra parking at the beginning.
From a new construction perspective, building [owners] will look at it and say, ‘Well, if we can rent out a portion of the garage initially’ — and have the option to terminate that if they need to take the spaces for the residents who ultimately move in — then they can do that. They’re generating revenue right away, which is great for the project because it’s getting this new revenue and it doesn’t even have all of the apartments filled. That’s kind of a more standard way that we work with new construction while it’s in this lease-up phase.
What we’ve found in different places is that the building will have an estimate on how many spaces will ultimately be taken up by the residents once they’re full. We’ve found that there’s often some that are actually not taking anybody in. So we’ve rented out some spaces even on the understanding that a year from now, when it’s fully leased, those last spaces might have to go to residents. While that can happen, often what we’ve seen is that they end up with those extra spaces and they continue to rent them out through WhereiPark because they just have extra spaces in the building. They’ve been able to capture this revenue and then they lease-up and continue to capture it going forward.
L: So if a new construction developer finds that they have an oversupply of parking once construction on the building is finished, they can generate revenue by renting out their parking spaces?
JZ: Exactly. It doesn’t happen all of the time. Sometimes they’re accurate. They never know exactly. Sometimes they actually don’t have enough spaces even for their residents because they’ve miscalculated. Most of the time there are some extra spaces, so it turns out that they do have extra, and there’s some interesting trends happening right now as a result of the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, we saw in urban areas less and less people having cars. So some of those estimates, by the time that [the building] is leased up, they’re saying, ‘Wow, we thought more people would have had cars but they didn’t because they’re using car-sharing and ride-sharing and just not getting their own car.’ I think people, in a lot of cases in some of those areas, would rather spend their money on a prime location than having a car.
Now that the pandemic has come in, things have changed a little bit and I guess we’ll see where this nets out, but the likelihood that someone wants to have a car has gone up because they have less comfort taking public transit. So I think we’ll see some of those ratios adjust. The other thing that that’s done is when we think about commuters, and we’re starting to see this more in the US as things seem to be a few months ahead in terms of economies reopening in certain states, that more people are driving. There’s a lot of people, for example, who had a car and they only used it on weekends because they would take the subway into work. Now, a lot of those people are saying, ‘I’m just going to drive in because I don’t want to be on the subway.’
The opportunity for new construction, or any of these kinds of buildings, I think is growing in the sense that there’s going to be more people who are looking for these long-term spaces. At least that’s the trend in the next little while, and we’ll see if it reverts back to where it was where more and more people were deciding not to have a car or not to have a second car in their household.
L: The scarcity of urban building space can influence what types of parking developers include in their development proposals. What parking trends are you noticing on that front?
AE: I think just more flexibility and people just starting to think more about alternative uses. Thinking about things like autonomous cars and delivery of packages into garages, and some of these more mobility-type solutions.
This type of thinking is happening more in the US than in Canada, but now a bunch of these US companies like Pinnacle and Greystar are coming into Canada, seeing Canada as a great growth opportunity, so I think you’ll start to see a lot of the thinking and new ideas from the US seep up into Canada as these groups create joint ventures like the one Greystar just did with Oxford, and Pinnacle has this group [called] Rhapsody. I think we’re quickly going to see Canada’s rental market change quite a bit in the next three to five years.
L: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are working from home now. How do you anticipate that this will affect parking and commuting in the long-term?
JZ: I think there’s a balance as far as parking is concerned. On the one hand, certainly, there’s less vehicles to the extent that people are working from home and not going into their urban office tower areas. On the other hand, to the extent that people are going there, I don’t think everyone is going to be working from home, but there will certainly be some working from home or maybe home for a few days of the week and then in the office for a few days of the week.
The other side of the balance is that for people who are going into the office, we’ve [heard] this anecdotally a lot, is that they’re far more likely to drive. The car is kind of this perfect bubble. It’s not exactly the most efficient thing from an energy perspective, but from a safety [perspective] of the person inside with regards to the pandemic, it’s definitely safe, so we’re seeing a lot more people who want to drive. That’s kind of the balance — less people going to the office everyday, but more people driving.
I think in some cities, there’s studies that are starting to come out where even though there’s less people there, there’s actually more cars, and so what that means is there is more pressure on parking and traffic.
The other thing that I think is related to this is flexibility. There’s some interesting models emerging. If you’re going to the office one or two days a week and you still use those monthly parking spaces, maybe you share them with colleagues who are going in on those other days, or maybe you’re buying passes that are valid for a certain number of days per month. And it’s just different models, so I think flexibility is going to be key around all of that.
L: What’s next for WhereiPark?
JZ: The big goal, and it’s been a goal during the pandemic and certainly for 2021, is continuing to add properties and grow our partner base on the real estate side. In fact, we’ve seen in the last few months, the last six months, a real surge in interest in buildings who are interested in generating ancillary revenue in their buildings. That’s the main objective in terms of 2021, to add lots of buildings and be prepared for what we think is going to be a very large increase in monthly parking demand that can be met by a lot of these multi-family buildings and even new construction-type buildings.
