When I first took over the management of a mixed-use property, the parking situation was, frankly, a mess.
Parking warnings were printed out of a Word document. License plates were kept track of, roughly, on a notepad. If a car showed up in the wrong spot three days in a row, the only way to know was to remember it. Of course, enforcement was impossible, and the tenants knew it. They essentially knew they could park anywhere they wanted and nothing would happen.
If you manage a property with shared parking, you probably know the feeling. Tenants take the customer spaces. Customers take the resident spaces. Someone sends a group text asking everyone to please be respectful, and nothing changes. And the one time you do write someone up, they dispute it, and you have nothing to show for where their car was, who wrote the notice, or when.
Here's what changed things for us, and how you can do the same.
Stop keeping plates in your head
The notepad was the real problem. You can't enforce what you can't remember.
When I started using Parking Manager, I stopped missing plates. The officer scans the plate with a phone camera, and the answer comes back in a moment, in a color you can read in bright sun:
- Green: a registered vehicle in the right zone.
- Red: the wrong zone, or over its limit.
- Purple: a vehicle that isn't on file.
No guessing, and no calling the office to ask. If the camera can't catch a plate, you type it in. And it keeps working when there's no signal in the back of the lot.
Make the notice impossible to argue with
This is the part that surprised me the most. The notice itself changed people's behavior.
We stopped handing out warnings from a Word template and started handing out real violation notices. Each one carries a photo of the car, the license plate, and the exact time the violation was issued, along with the zone, the reason, and a map with a pin where the car was parked. It prints in English and Spanish, and it prints at the office on its own, the moment it's written in the lot.
When people saw a picture of their own car on a notice, with their plate and the time printed right there, they knew things had changed. You can argue with a note on a windshield. It's a lot harder to argue with a photo.
Keep the office and the lot on the same page
Whoever is walking the lot carries the app on an Android phone or an iPhone. The office works from a web dashboard, where the vehicle registry lives and where every scan and notice can be reviewed. Both sides write to the same record.
So when someone comes to the office to dispute a notice, you pull up their plate and see every scan and every notice, in order, with who took each step. That conversation goes very differently when you have the history in front of you.
Decide where the line is before you need it
Most people fix their behavior after a notice or two. Some won't. For those, you want a clear line, set ahead of time, so it never feels personal.
In Parking Manager, you turn tow eligibility on, choose how many delivered violations it takes (the default is two), and set the grace window your jurisdiction requires. Courtesy notices never count, and a notice that wasn't delivered never counts against a driver. When a plate crosses the line, the printed notice becomes a final notice with the exact date and time the vehicle becomes tow-eligible. The office sees a countdown, and the officer's phone sends an alert when the time is up, so nobody has to remember.
If it comes to a tow, have the paperwork ready
At our property, one vehicle kept coming back after warning after warning. It belonged to an employee of one of our tenants. Eventually, we had it towed.
A tow is where a thin record gets expensive, so the record matters. It holds the notices that justified the tow, keeps the tow time and the entry time as separate timestamps, and takes notes and attachments that can be added but never rewritten. It can be voided, but never deleted. You can print it as a one-page Vehicle Tow Record, the document you'd hand an attorney or an insurer if it ever came to that.
Word travelled fast.
What happened
We went from essentially zero compliance to roughly 90% in about three weeks. After the tow, it climbed again. Today we're at 99%.
None of that came from new rules. The rules were the same ones we'd always had. What changed was that every plate got recorded, every notice had proof behind it, and everyone could see it.
If you're where I was, here's where I'd start:
- Get plates out of your head and off the notepad. Scan every one.
- Put a photo, the plate and the exact time on every notice.
- Keep the lot and the office working from the same record.
- Set your line for escalation ahead of time, and stick to it.
Parking Manager is part of SquareKeeper Property, and you can try it free for 30 days, no credit card needed.