Combined with a smart, touch screen kiosk which can accept multiple payment options such as SnapScan, Zapper etc the solution ensures fast, efficient movement whether users have downloaded the app or not.

In an age where old-fashioned paper-based legacy parking systems represent big Capex and Opex expenditure, Parket simplifies and enhances operations at parking lots, delivering greater efficiency and profitability for operators.

It is a digital solution that includes remote management, payments, bay optimisation connecting drivers and vacant parking bays in real time via an app, access control, and bringing in income off vacant spaces and lots.

Joshua Raphael, Parket founder and CEO, says that in February this year, Parket processed more than 20000 visitors at the new Riverlands development.

Riverlands, a Zenprop development in Cape Town, is a pioneering mixed-use development that brings retail, commercial and residential into one precinct, and also celebrates the heritage of the First Nations collective.

“It has been a success. This project was built from the ground up, so to speak. In other words, the new development built ticketless parking into its design from day one, entering into an arrangement of no operational costs of standard parking from the day it opened its doors.”

He says that unlike legacy parking payment machines, the Smartkiosks don’t become outdated with a shelf-life, because they are designed with continually updated hardware and software that sees them become smarter over time.

“This is a great investment because there will never be a need for a legacy overall,” explains Raphael. “Beyond this, technology such as the integrated scanner to scan retail slips for discounted parking rates makes the Smartkiosks simple and smart, enabling users of all ages – even if they’re not comfortable with apps and technology – to use the service easily.”

Raphael says that the company’s other recent successful partnership and focus is at Melrose Arch in Johannesburg, with Amdec Group, which is an order of magnitude more visitors each month and is their current focus to convert to completely ticketless.

Zenprop’s Rob Thomson says that the business recognised early on in the planning phase that the operation and management of the parking would be critical in the success of the precinct, and so the business assessed all available parking options in the market.

“Being a mixed use precinct, getting vehicles in and out of the parking areas efficiently was paramount. To complicate things further, we have a variety of parking scenarios due to our varied tenant mix, so we required a bespoke parking solution. The Parket ticketless proposition ensured the efficiency we were looking for, and the fact that Parket would provide a customised solution designed to meet our specific requirements were the differentiators,” says Thomson.

Raphael says that a smart ticketless system speeds up vehicle access and egress quicker than traditional parking solutions. Thomson agrees, adding that it becomes even more efficient with repeat customers who quickly become familiar with the modern system.

Modern businesses understand that customer-centricity is key, says Raphael. “This is how we approach the design of our solutions because the goal is efficient parking management, whether that’s speeding the flow of vehicles or providing businesses with the ability to monetise empty spaces efficiently,” he says.

This is likely behind Parket’s rapid growth among some of the most recognisable names in the commercial, hotel, airport, office park and mixed-use space.

“It’s been a great journey, since identifying a need in the market for taking parking well-and truly into the digital age, while placing sustainability and carbon-friendly practices front and centre. We have a solid base in Cape Town and Johannesburg and by all indications, the future of parking is bright,” he says.

The move by Parket is the latest in a string of high-profile customers who are attracted to a digital platform that automatically manages access control and enables landlords to connect empty spaces with motorists looking for parking, providing a hassle-free way to monetise their facilities.

Technology companies are often associated with the word “disruption”, and Parket founder and CEO Joshua Raphael says the perhaps the biggest disruption to the current parking management landscape is that the Parket platform drastically reduces Capex by a factor of 10x, while operational costs are almost nonexistent, which is a direct clash with current systems that are paper-based and rely on clunky legacy systems that require maintenance and upkeep.

“We are proud to sign Growthpoint Properties. It is especially rewarding that we will be able to use our turnkey solution to drive not only massive cost savings for Growthpoint, but also to work towards evolving this partnership further,” says Raphael.

The cost savings and ease of use were a strong selling point, but so too was the fact that the platform is environmentally friendly by virtue of being paperless and by reducing the time that cars idle up and down parkades generating greenhouse gases.

As a market leader and the largest JSE-listed REIT, Growthpoint is always looking for ways to continuously support sustainable innovation in South Africa, achieved through strategic partnerships which create new and improved ways of simplifying and improving the tenant experience.

Parket is world-class, and its parking management platform automatically manages parking allocation, payment and access control via licence plate reading technology. This, and the fact that empty bays can be managed and monetised on an hourly, daily or monthly basis, is attractive from a business perspective. The environmentally friendly nature of the platform demonstrates that this is a forward-looking solution.

Parket simplifies and enhances operations at parking lots, delivering greater efficiency and profitability for operators.

It is a digital solution that includes remote management, payments, connecting drivers and vacant parking bays in real time via an app, access control, and bringing in income off vacant spaces and lots.

“What a lot of our customers love besides the massive capex and opex savings, is the efficiency – it is entirely automated, meaning that management of the parking for all stakeholders becomes much more streamlined” explains Raphael.

Parket’s rapid growth, among household names in the commercial, hotel, airport and office park space shows no signs of abating and Raphael says that the solution currently serves not only office parks but residential lots too.

The platform is ideal for all industries, including retail, where there is a need for efficient parking management. Regarding growing beyond Cape Town, Raphael says there most certainly are plans to scale the business into other cities now that the groundwork has been laid and Parket is on track for the next phase of growth internationally.

Proptech is changing the shape of the commercial and private real estate markets and is likely to continue disrupting the way things have been done for generations.

By mixing real estate with technology to optimise industries, create new ones, and generate efficiencies or capabilities that improve revenue generation, something as fundamental as the concept of parking – something we have all done since the first day we started driving – has been turned on its head.

With the current evolution of proptech, it’s critical to understand the key industry trends for 2023, while realising that the very nature of technology means that things may evolve faster than expected or change tack completely – all in search of providing a compelling business case and improving property management.

ALSO READ: Spleet Closes $2.6 million Seed Round to Scale its Residential Rent focused Products

The whole point of innovation is to make life better. Consider the invention of the wheel, or the combine harvester, or the aeroplane, or – in our case – incorporating number plate recognition into parking management, so that it can talk to a software platform and automatically raise booms for cars as they enter parkades based on recognising the licence number from an app input. Technology makes life and business easier, better and more efficient.

Let’s cast our eyes well into the future. A recent breakthrough by scientists in the USA has sparked hopes of a critical breakthrough in clean energy.

The scientists were able to produce energy from nuclear fusion, which is different from the nuclear fission currently found in nuclear power stations.

The long-term picture this promises to paint is one where clean, nuclear fusion provides near limitless power – a commodity in great demand and one becoming increasingly difficult to secure in South Africa. Just imagine a future where developments, housing estates, commercial properties, all run off sufficient, reliable and clean power.

Bringing the lens a little closer to where we are today, we’re likely to see the following trends continue to drive proptech: cloud computing, big data and AI, automation, IoT, virtual and augmented reality, and increasingly more elaborate property management platforms.

1. Cloud computing

Just like every other aspect of work and home life, digitisation implies cloud computing. Besides redundancy and accessibility – as long as there is connectivity – it enables scale at a level previously impossible.

An application in the cloud can manage large disparate inputs from anywhere in the world, in almost real-time. From private and commercial estate agents to managing agents, and a host of intermediary service providers, expect to keep seeing a massive uptake and move to cloud.

2. Big data

In the greater scheme of things, the concept of big data is still fairly new. Whereas a few years ago, opinion and trend pieces spoke about the potential of big data, today, as hardware and software evolve, proof of concepts can be found everywhere.

Perhaps one of the most exciting things that big data enables is predictive analytics. Landlords can analyse utility usage and predict, to the hour and the day, the next time there will be spikes.

Similarly, they can analyse foot or vehicle traffic based on historical and real-time data and predict spikes and troughs in order to manage capacity accurately and efficiently – saving time and money, but also improving user and customer experience.

On the other hand, reporting has been catapulted into the future, which provides immense value not only to business leaders but also shareholders.

This can also be flipped on its head. Today, institutional and retail investors have access to tools that enable them to analyse sectors, industries and regions within minutes, giving them more insights than ever before. Property investors no longer need to rely on the word of a property agent, they can see the data for themselves.

As machine learning and AI – dependent on big data – evolve, we will continue seeing innovations in the use of virtual assistants, facial and voice sentiment analysis and more. Think about it, if AI can compose original music on command or draw pictures of anything you can imagine, the use of assistants in commercial and property management applications is almost endless.

3. Automation

This is the name of the game in proptech and will continue being deployed across more areas. From estate agents, to brokers, to landlords, to property managers and others, the menial time-consuming tasks that used to take up inordinate amounts of time in the past will continue to be automated.

Communication, marketing, e-contracts, even closing deals, and more, will continue to be automated as the machines take on more of the everyday tasks so that human capital can be deployed to spend valuable time and creativity on building compelling business differentiators.

Previously (and still in most parkades today), a driver would show up at a parkade, press a button and receive a little white ticket. This driver would then drive around a parkade looking for an open bay. Some parkades have made use of little red and green light indicators for whether the parking is open or taken.

The person would park their car and go do their business. When it came time to leave, the person would find a machine and insert the card. If it didn’t work, or there was a problem of some kind, they would need to press a button and wait to speak to an operator to get the problem resolved.

Then they would pay, either by cash or by card, and have a window period to walk to their car and make their way to the parkade exit. They would insert the card into a machine at the exit, and the boom would raise allowing them to drive off. In other parkades, a person sat at the exit and took payment and raised the boom.

Parket has changed this process. The car drives up, cameras recognise the number plate, the boom opens. The driver knows there’s open parking because the app works in real-time. They park, do their business and leave, the boom opening as they exit, while their card will be charged for the time they used. Not only does this vastly improve customer experience, but it allows landlords to generate income on open parkings while drastically reducing the time and resource management required to run a parkade effectively.

4. IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been a hot topic for a long time. At its most simple explanation: imagine little sensors on almost everything that provide real-time data to either monitor, predict, react or manage the physical environment.

A landlord would know before a crisis occurs such as when the machines running the booms need to be serviced, or when pressure in the plumbing has increased to dangerous levels.

Resources to manage assets can be deployed when any alerts from real-time readings exceed predetermined thresholds. Parkades could integrate into smart buildings and smart cities. This future is far closer than many think.

5. Virtual and augmented reality

The pandemic no doubt accelerated the use of VR and technology has disrupted the property sector. 3D renderings and virtual reality tours have taken marketing and interactive meetings to an entirely new level. Proptech will no doubt continue to innovate in this field, but it’s in another world altogether where this will be most important.

Real estate agents, property managers, service providers and even customers will make use of VR to buy virtual property, manage virtual property and interact with virtual property in the metaverse.

As is fairly obvious, the only limit in any discussion about trends for the next year, or longer-term future, is the imagination of the entrepreneur and the problem they wish to solve. However, innovation is only successful if it solves a problem. Remember, technology exists to make life better.

This has been the mantra at Parket and it is the reason we have been able to disrupt and reimagine the parking market in South Africa, for both landlords or property managers and customers – because whether it is the cloud, automation or video recognition – technology is used to solve a problem.

Parking is one such industry, where the rapid uptake of cashless, paperless, digital parking solutions is changing the face of something we have all just taken for granted for generations. 

Demand for parking solutions, such as Parket, is driven by consumer demand and landlords’ need for efficiency and increased revenue.

This results in an old paradigm industry – which, let’s be honest, makes money for a number of stakeholders off sheer inefficiency – being disrupted at an increasingly rapid pace. This is a global trend, and one we are seeing gaining momentum in South Africa. 

When the World Health Organisation announced that handling of money may contribute to spreading the Covid-19 virus, the drive towards a cashless society got a huge shot in the arm. Naturally, a country like South Africa that has a large and vibrant informal sector still depends heavily on cash, but one need only look around at the sheer number of tap payments, QR code payments, and more, to see that consumer behaviour has certainly evolved, and that there is less and less suspicion about the safety of technology.

Beyond that, the convenience that digital transformation brings cannot be ignored. Can you imagine sitting at a restaurant five years ago with no menu? Time and effort was spent on flashy menus that needed to be maintained, lest they got worn and looked old. Today a QR code takes you to the website menu. Advertisements in magazines and newspapers, products you buy – they all entice the user – who is most likely equipped with a smartphone – with a single click to visit their digital platform for more information – where data is no doubt used to curate an experience. 

We all use applications daily. An app for this, and an app for that. Often, they are integrated and read information from various sources to deliver the experience we demand – in real time. To say that the world has changed, would be an understatement. 

So, what then of the typical parking experience from the eye of a customer, or the person who uses the parking? It usually starts with placing a paper parking ticket somewhere and then trying not to lose it. If you do, you know there are penalties to pay. If it has been bent in your wallet or pocket, it might not work when you do eventually locate a paying station – which, if we are honest, may or may not work when you need it to. 

If it doesn’t work, there is a button which calls a person who either helps you or annoys you, and this has a large impact on your overall experience of using the parkade. If it does work, you either pay cash, which is a pain for those who don’t enjoy carrying money, or you use a debit or credit card – if the unit works. 

You then place the ticket back in a safe space, walk to your car and unpack groceries and deal with children as fast as possible to ensure you exit the parkade before the leeway period has passed. Once more you need to locate the ticket you put away amidst doing everything else.

Compare this to the experience of using Parket, for example. You drive up to the boom, your number plate is recognised and the boom lifts. You drive to the parking you booked with a few clicks. When you are finished doing your business, you go to your car and leave – and you are digitally charged for the time you used. No paper. No people. No fuss.

The second scenario is clearly more in touch with how our world has evolved from a convenience and customer experience perspective. We live in an age where time is literally money. But beyond that, the rapid uptake of cashless and ticketless parking platforms is driven by more than just the customer experience it delivers – which, make no mistake, is vital (we have picked up a remarkable return-use of the application by end customers).

On the landlord side, a key driver is the ability to efficiently manage empty parking bays in real time. For example, if there is an empty bay in a parkade and a driver en-route to the area in need of a parking space, who would not want to connect the two? This type of efficiency is only possible with technology. Vacant parking bays do nothing. Occupied parking bays make money. This is an important opportunity for landlords to earn extra revenue off an asset they already own. This cannot be discounted in an age where the habits of customers and employees have changed dramatically from pre-Covid patterns and there is an increased build to draw a simple and effective bridge between supply and demand. 

Another factor driving the uptake of platforms such as Parket is the general trend away from Capex. If one considers a business moving to the cloud – essentially, they are rewriting the rule book: before, there was a huge Capex investment to set up data centres, while the Opex was dominated by maintenance and enough skilled people. Today, businesses can forgo the Capex investment and utilise various subscription services to do the same task more affordably, more securely, more efficiently and more safely.

There are similarities with parkade management. There would be a large initial investment in the payment stations and ticket machines at the booms. Then there would be substantial Opex required to keep it all going – maintenance of the machines, paper for the tickets, and people to manage various stations. People, as we know, come with a quantitative and qualitative cost: what do they earn, and what are you paying in terms of customer experience? 

Earlier, I referenced money being made out of inefficiencies: think about the service costs, replacement costs, raw material costs, and more. For each of those costs, someone is making money and someone is spending money. 

While customer experience, increased revenue opportunities and a drastically reduced Capex and Opex are currently the main drivers of the rise of cashless and ticketless parking platforms, there are other considerations which are going to become increasingly important and accelerate the uptake further. 

The first is the impact on the environment, from discarding paper to eliminating fruitless idling, the lower impact on the environment is obvious for all to see. Another is the move towards smart cities – within time, buildings, parkades and roads will all be fitted with sensors that need to be integrated into various platforms that deliver a smart city experience. There is no place for dinosaur technology in this world. 

Data-driven insights already mean that a platform such as Parket can deliver an experience, for owners of buildings, tenants and drivers, that is unmatched in terms of efficiency and revenue-generating potential. It’s this very ability to use real-time and historical data to improve the service that will see platforms such as Parket being built into a broader smart city network. 

Another trend we are likely to see, in the not-so-distant future, at least from Parket’s perspective, is automated pricing based on demand. This is where real-time occupancy levels will determine pricing of individual bays to achieve a desired revenue target. This is not possible without the power of real-time data. Don’t be surprised to see pedestrian access, through turnstiles or the like, become integrated into the parking solution to offer corporate clients a single view of all their access points. 

The horse has bolted, so to speak. It’s only a matter of time before everyone joins the party because the future has no place for acting like the past. For instance – if you want to share this article, will you print it, and fax it, or print it or photocopy it, scan it and then email it? The answer is a resounding no to both, because the world has evolved and there is no need to go through those laborious steps. Expect the same to occur with parking lots in a city near you, very soon.