Getting Your Car Ready For Emergencies

Three Options For Your New Apartment Complex's Parking Lot

29 March 2016

Eetu Ketola

If you are the owner of a new apartment complex, you and the management have to figure out how to deal with the parking lot. You can't simply make the lot open to everyone because then anyone -- from visitors to complete strangers to people abandoning their cars -- could park in the lot, taking up spaces meant for residents. Even gates can't really help this since many times, a fast car can sneak in behind a resident entering the lot before the gate closes. You have three basic options for parking permissions; here's a look at how each could affect you.

Reserved Spots

One option is to pair each parking spot with a particular unit. Unit 1 has Spot A, and so on. This one can be handy if you don't want to deal with handing out or collecting permits or if you don't have a security guard who can check parked vehicles for permits. It also leaves the monitoring to the tenant who normally uses the spot. In other words, if a stranger parks in the spot, the tenant has to call you to get a tow truck to come out. A big benefit to that is that if a tenant gets a new car, there's no worry about getting a new permit and no worry about having to explain why there's a different car in the spot. The tenant can also lend the spot to someone who is visiting that tenant. This is a good option if you want flexibility and generally low maintenance.

However, there is some maintenance involved. You'd have to keep a log in the complex office to keep track of who has which spot, especially if you were not using the same numbers on the parking spots for security reasons. If you use the same numbers (e.g., Apartment 201 has the spot labeled as 201), then thieves can look to see which spots are empty and thus which apartments might be unoccupied at that time.

Reserved With Permit

You can take the previous option one step further by both reserving spots and issuing permits. The permits make it easy to see whether a car belongs in the lot or not. You'd still have to keep a log of who has which spot, but the permits mean you don't have to get the log to see if a car should be in the lot to begin with. If you have a security guard who makes the rounds often, or if you have a towing company make occasional rounds of the lot, having a permit is better.

However, that does mean you have to remember to collect the permit when the tenant moves out. Also, if the permit is a sticker as opposed to a placard, the tenant would not be able to have friends park in the spot, meaning you'd have to ensure you had visitor parking or ample street parking nearby.

Open With Permit

Another option is to get rid of the reserved spots but keep the permits. The advantages here are that you don't have to keep a log of who has which spot, and you don't have to worry about tenants complaining that other tenants are taking the wrong spots. The disadvantage remains that you have to collect the permits upon move-out so that the old tenant can't keep parking in the lot, plus you may get complaints from tenants who get home late that they always have to park far away.

Key to all of these options is having a good working relationship with a towing company. You want to keep numbers on file so that you can tow cars as needed (and so that the owners of those cars know who to call to find the cars), and if possible, you want the company to do those aforementioned periodic patrols through the lot if you use permits. Consider partnering with a towing company like Stuckman Salvage, Inc.

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