Parkable: Make Some Extra Money Renting out Your Extra Parking Spaces

Technology Driven Side Hustles- Parkable

The gig economy and app sharing services have made it much easier to earn extra money than ever before. You can now run a side hustle to earn extra money using just the phone in your pocket.

You can make some extra money by renting out your spare room through Airbnb. You can make some extra money by becoming a driver for Uber, or the kiwi equivalent Zoomy You can freelance all sorts of things like web design, writing, sales and marketing, and data analytics on platforms like Upwork .

But there are also some new Kiwi startups that you might want to consider.

This is the first of two articles looking into apps and services that you could use to make some extra money on the side. So if you’re keen to read the second article make sure to subscribe.

Introducing Parkable

Winner of the Rising Star award in the Deloitte Fast 50 in 2018, Parkable is a New Zealand startup that this year also launched in Australia and China.

What is Parkable?

Parkable is a sharing economy app for parking, which connects people with underused parking space to those looking for somewhere to park.

Parkable’s backstory

Parkable began in 2015 when New Zealand founders Toby, Brody, and Warwick came together, fed up with how much parking sucked – exorbitant prices, towing, broken parking machines, and endless circling the block for a parking spot. At the same time, plenty of parking spaces sat empty in the form of residential driveways and underused business parks.

The three founders began scheming around Toby’s kitchen table, trying to figure out how to fix a broken system through an intuitive, powerful app. Their vision was to reduce parking stress, support the efficient use of space, and allow communities to make good use of underutilised assets through a sharing economy for parking.

The app launched in mid-August 2015 offering 170 parks for the Bledisloe Cup match at Eden Park.

Since then, Parkable has expanded into a team of thirty-nine, built some amazing technology, and jumped the ditch to Australia and China. They are now providing a better parking experience to over 50,000 people, and have over 4,000 crowdsourced car park addresses listed on the platform.

How You can use Parkable to generate extra income as a side hustle

Parkable hosts include individuals with residential driveways, small-to-medium size businesses, churches, schools, supermarkets, and commercial vacancies. Basically, anyone with underutilised parking space can become a host and make some extra income on the side.

To become a Parkable host, you simply download the Parkable app and ‘create a car park’ on the platform. You have control over the price and availability of the car park, so the park is yours when they need it, and generating income when you don’t.

For people with residential driveways, the platform allows you to nominate the times of day and days of the week that the parking space is available. That means that you can make your park available while you’re at work, with the knowledge that it will be all free when you get home.

For businesses like restaurants that only need their car park during the evening, you can make your park available for the rest of the time. And for churches and other organisations, it means that the park can be open and generating revenue whenever there isn’t a service or event.

There are also no contracts or signup fees, and you can turn your park off or make it unavailable whenever you like. You can list your park either for short term parking sessions or rent it out long term as a subscription-based park.

You can list almost any type of parking space you can think of. Inner-city residential driveways, carports, empty lots, extra customer spaces that aren’t being used, after-hours customer parking. Anywhere you can fit a car you can list it- as long as you have the rights to the site.

Parking with Parkable

Parkable makes it clear to parkers where available space is, allows people to reserve a bay in advance, and promotes lower prices.

Parkable allows parkers to start and stop a one-off session using the mobile app. The parker will then only be charged for how long they park rather than having to guess how long their appointment or meeting will be, which is the case under the traditional model.

A second type of service is aimed at commuters who want to subscribe to a carpark and have exclusive access to it with the guarantee that it’ll be there waiting for them every morning. The subscription can all be managed through the app and be stopped or restarted at any time.

Parkable enables people to rent their space when they aren’t using it, and also helps enterprise businesses to better use their car parks. The platform makes it clear where available space is, allows people to reserve a bay in advance, and promotes lower prices

Parkable’s Commissions

It’s completely free to list a parking space, and with no contracts, so you can remove your parking space any time you want.

Parkable works like most app sharing services. They have a revenue-sharing model where they collect the payment on behalf of you and take a commission. This commission covers everything including customer service, support, making payments, and marketing, as well as any profit for the company.

The default commission taken by Parkable is 20% excluding bank charges, with a higher fee if you want Parkable’s team to manage the park for you. The bank charges are linked to customers using credit cards to make payments and are typically between 3-5%. So you can expect anywhere from 75% to 80% of the revenue from your parking space.

Check out some Parkable Hosts

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