In late 2019, Jessica Warrior, CPM RPA, Director of Property Management at Granite Properties, engaged with Smarking, a San Francisco-based technology company empowering 2,500+ parking facilities across North America with real-time parking data analytics, dynamic pricing, and digital parking passes, to enable centralized parking operations KPI tracking. Over the past 3 years, the Granite Property Experience Team piloted Smarking’s Business Intelligence (BI) software at five office buildings to track all parking KPIs in real-time remotely, and to enable data-driven parking operations.
Real-time Parking KPI Tracking
At Weslayan Tower, Chase Crawford, Granite’s General Manager in Houston, and Mary Caroline O’Leary, Granite’s Property Manager, told the Smarking team that they’ve always sought a solution to understand granular parking activities at the facility in a timely fashion, but nothing on the market satisfied their need until Smarking BI was activated.
“At Granite, we strive to create a work environment where our customers can flourish. Smarking enables our Property Experience Team to better understand the building utilization of individual customers, along with the overarching traffic patterns for the whole property. This information is important because it can prevent parking overbuild and offer more efficient parking solutions to Granite customers.”
Chase Crawford, Houston General Manager, Granite Properties
Since the launch, they have used Smarking BI daily to monitor performance. Not only is Smarking BI used to generate granular insights into daily and hourly performance, but also to enable data-driven budgeting and forecasting. Carmen Price, Parking Manager (Platinum Parking) at Weslayan Tower, is currently accessing historical occupancy information via Smarking to set the 2023 budget.
“Smarking saves me 10+ hours a week by not having to pull reports out of parking gates and crunch numbers on excel spreadsheets,” said Carmen. “This is over 500 hours a year!”
Carmen Price, Parking Manager (Platinum Parking) at Weslayan Tower
With Smarking, Carmen can now spend more time on customer service and satisfaction. Property Managers at other Granite office buildings rely on Smarking for similar reasons, including Diane Clark and Vicky Nguyen at 100 Bayview in Newport Beach, Trish Belaire at 3333 Lee Parkway in Dallas, Jake Hollis at 500 and 550 @TheBrand in Glendale, and Tanya Bouthillier at Plaza Tower One in Denver.
Fig 1. Weslayan Tower’s Property Experience Team uses Smarking to gain insights into tenant garage usage.
Data-driven Tenant Services
At 100 Bayview, Diane Clark, Property Manager, and Vicky Nguyen, Parking Facility Manager, use Smarking to understand tenant-level parking usage, which was unavailable prior to Smarking BI’s activation.Throughout the pandemic, Diane and Vicky have regularly tracked this KPI and used it to provide customized services to each customer group based on their parking needs.
At Weslayan Tower, the Granite Property Experience Team relies on Smarking for tenant occupancy information and oversell analysis. Before Smarking, oversell analysis was a very manual process, requiring dozens of hours pulling data from the gates and uploading and analyzing it in Excel. With Smarking, Mary Caroline O’Leary and Carmen Price can input the number of spaces and current cardholders in seconds, and Smarking’s algorithm provides the precise number of additional cards they should sell.
“We save so much time using Smarking’s oversell recommendation tool. I can’t imagine going back to figuring out oversell recommendations manually.”
Mary Caroline O’Leary, Property Manager, Granite Properties
Fig 2. Granite Properties was named NAIOP’s 2022 Developer of the Year.
With the return of the workforce to the office across the nation post-pandemic, Granite Properties is laser focused on ensuring customer satisfaction by providing white-glove services. Data driven parking management on a per customer basis serves a key role in meeting this goal.
“In the ongoing recovery following the pandemic, Smarking enables our property experience team to better understand individual customer utilization. This allows us to gauge the overall return of the workforce to the buildings in addition to giving us information to serve each of our unique customers most effectively.”
Jessica Warrior, Director of Property Management, Granite Properties
To uncover opportunities for your company, chat with our team. We offer free one-on-one consultations, just grab a time on our calendar if you’re interested. By providing market-leading Business Intelligence and Yield Management solutions to the industry, Smarking has been enabling revenue increases at 2,500+ parking locations across North America.
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About Smarking
Smarking is a San Francisco based tech company serving commercial real estate owners, parking operators, municipal governments and others to maximize business results for parking assets. Empowered by a team of MIT data scientists, urban mobility experts, Silicon Valley software engineers, and business professionals, Smarking’s market leading business intelligence and yield management software solution suite currently helps over 2,500+ parking locations in the USA and Canada maximize NOI optimization, tenant satisfaction, cost reduction, and enables data-driven parking policies.