It should make our lives easier, remove friction, automate repetitive tasks, and much more. However, in our quest to streamline and optimise the world around us, it is important that we don’t leave anyone behind.

This is true for all technology, and especially in the world of smart parking management systems. Technology must be inclusive, never exclusive.

While every person is different, age often affects how comfortable people are with new technology. Younger generations tend to adopt new tools quickly.

Older generations, especially those over 60, may be more hesitant, often preferring cash, paper tickets, or avoiding apps altogether.

At Parket, we saw this first hand at a parking site next to a retirement village, where many visitors were from an older demographic. It raised a big question: how do you modernise parking without leaving anyone behind?

In the era of doing away with paper waste, of removing inefficiencies in parking management and driving down upfront and ongoing costs, do we do so while excluding our parents and grandparents? Of course not.

And so, much like any other technology designed to improve life, smart parking management needs to cater to all generations.

This doesn’t mean a compromise in the intelligence or capabilities of digital solutions, it just means meeting people where they are, in a way that makes them comfortable.

Let’s unpack some of the challenges we have experienced when catering to age groups older than 60. QR codes, which may be natural to someone younger, are outside the comfort zone of many older people.

We certainly found a resistance, among older groups specifically, to downloading apps onto smartphones.

There was a discomfort with digital payment systems and an explicit preference for cash and paper transactions. And so the question arose: How do we find smarter ways to manage parking?

When the iPhone launched it was revolutionary. Think about it: At the time phones were populated with tiny keyboards and looked like little computers.

Then, out of the blue, a smart phone was born that had one button and a screen – yet it had all the functionality of its predecessors, and much more.

We needed to design the iPhone of parking kiosks – something that gave users a sense of familiarity and comfort but which radically shifted the paradigm of what is possible in terms of parking management, payment and access control. The design was informed by prioritising how simple it is for people to use every step of the way.

We needed a keyboard redesign to include letters and numbers easily, we needed a simplified first interaction through to license plate entry and we needed to do this by removing unnecessary technological barriers. It was an iterative process built on observation and adaptation.

And then a breakthrough occurred. One afternoon I witnessed a pivotal moment when a couple who were aged 75 or higher walked up to navigate the smart kiosk.

This is what happened: The husband typed in the license plate of his car with his wife’s support, who read out the plate details to him.

They followed the simple steps on the screen, paid like they would in a shop, walked to their car, made their way to the boom which recognised their number plate and opened, and off they drove.

What happened was almost magical. By creating an interface that people can recognise but which is smart, the solution is able to bring completely offline people into the digital realm.

They experienced something as simple as paying for parking, except that it happened quicker, and without a paper ticket that needed to be inserted into an antiquated exit terminal.

The exercise transformed technological intimidation into user experience, and importantly, user confidence.

While this example demonstrates how older generations need not be alienated by digital transformation that is designed to improve functionality, especially in the realm of parking management, it also opens the door to solving one of the most common challenges in all paperless, app-based transitions.

How do you change the behaviour of a cohort of customers who are used to doing something one way, but are now “expected” to do it another way?

The smart kiosks offer a gateway, a bridge as it were, between the physical world of parking kiosks and the digital realm of intelligent parking management. Once users experience the system for themselves and develop trust and confidence, incentives to bring them into an app environment are far more effective.

Inclusive design isn’t just good practice, it’s essential. When we build technology that works for everyone, we create better experiences, foster trust, and open the door to wider adoption.

The smartest solutions are the ones that don’t leave anyone behind. If we’re building for the future, let’s make sure everyone’s invited.

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.

Major South African cities have long harboured dreams of becoming smart cities. In the case of a city such as Johannesburg, this means building an urban environment that is connected, intelligent and safe, as well as creating a sustainable and liveable city amongst others.

It also means smart mobility, though these aspirations are thwarted by hugely inefficient parking for most parts of the city.

It’s true; parking is once again becoming a nightmare as parking lots around the city edge closer to pre-pandemic levels. As a result, there are motorists driving up and down – wasting time and fuel – looking for parking while right next to them might be buildings with vacant bays that could be used instead. In addition, a shift by some organisations to full-time hybrid working has seen them cut down on parking spaces with employees taking turns on which day of the week to come into the office. How do they efficiently manage all of this?

This places the focus squarely back on the urgent need to adopt a better way of managing this scarce and precious real estate.

Modern Internet of Things (IoT) technologies not only match demand with supply, but do so in a far more cost-effective, real-time and seamless way that brings numerous benefits to landlords, office park managers and retail centres, while also significantly improving the user experience for the motorists by digitising parking.

Afterall, people use mobile apps daily to do almost everything – why not for parking too? Indeed, there is an ongoing transition to the next phase of parking technology that is cashless, offers robust parking management features for operators and makes the sector more sustainable by cutting out tickets.

But, then why are we still using paper tickets (how many trees per day is that?) and having to run around to find parking paypoints that actually work?

Fragmentation in parking offerings

A major obstacle for the local sector has been the fragmentation in available parking systems, which poses a serious challenge when it comes to flexibility of operations.

Solutions either focus on access control, or short-term parking solutions, or long-term parking solutions, but are not capable of doing it all. Then, there isn’t any real parking management software to speak of and information pulled from such systems are often confined to antiquated spreadsheets that don’t offer much insight.

What the industry needs is a turnkey digital parking solution with real-time management of the full parking ecosystem that can help them effectively solve the growing city parking challenge, especially if it is to meet the demands of both the people who own and/or operate parking as well as the end users – the motorists looking for vacant bays.

Turnkey IoT parking solution

Solutions like Parket can not only meet this demand, but are able to achieve this through the use of mobile applications, cloud-based management dashboards and contactless technology, including automatic licence plate recognition technology.

Furthermore, the IoT SIM cards used by the parking machines ensure that there is always direct communication between parking lots and those managing them. It also in effect creates an up-to-date directory that the public can easily access in order to find the nearest (or best) parking for their next trip into the city.

Of course, modern businesses know that customer-centricity is key, and it is no different to Parket’s approach. In the full knowledge that not every user will want to download an app to their mobile device, motorists at a parking lot or retail centre can pay through scanning a QR code, while once-off visitors to a business in an office park can also be sent the QR access code via text or instant messaging for ease of access.

Robust cloud-based management

By accessing a cloud-based dashboard, those managing and operating parking lots (or simply landlords looking to make the most of vacant bays) are able to easily manage their inventory as well as monetise their parking spaces and even have previously empty bays filled in order to become an additional revenue stream.

In addition, data collected can be analysed and used to identify usage trends over time in order to enable overselling – afterall, vacant parking lots don’t make money.

In the case of office parks, landlords are able to provide separate dashboards for their tenants, which their tenants can in turn use to manage parking for employees as well as visitor access.

This information can then be accessed by the landlord so that they know how much tenants need to be charged for parking. This is all done seamlessly, reducing administration requirements for both landlord and tenant while also getting rid of manual processes that are prone to error.

Increasing revenue, reducing costs

The benefits all add up: as an example, one of Parket’s customers, The Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital (formerly City Park Hospital) doubled its parking revenue within six months, albeing against the backdrop of a rebounding regional economy, and demonstrates how IoT technology can be used to bridge the supply and demand for parking bays, while also generating revenue for customers.

Based on its success in Cape Town, Parket has recently made a concerted effort to raise awareness of a better way to park, and manage parking in Johannesburg.

This, as well as Johanneburg’s moves towards becoming a smart city is key to the city’s development.

Beyond the increased revenue, it also helps to drastically cut down on costs – not only is legacy parking extremely inefficient, it comes with the exorbitant associated costs, including for ticket issuing and reading machines at the entrances and exits, traditional payment machines for those who want to use cash, as well as more complex machines that cater for those wanting additional payment methods such as by card or QR code. Then, there is the issue of maintenance, which is not cheap either (remember all the broken payment machines? That’s why).

Instead, landlords and parking lot operators turning to a turnkey IoT parking solution can look forward to a platform that cuts capital expenditure by up to a factor of ten, while providing a fully digital, cashless, paperless and contactless interface that draws in motorists because of the convenience and seamless user experience.

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.

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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.