Enforcing your parking rules is an important part of an effective parking system. While an enforcement company can make a good partner, they shouldn’t be the ones who own your parking program.
In this blog post, we’ll look at three reasons why you don’t want to give parking control to your enforcement company.
You need to be the Parking Boss
If you consider your community as a whole, parking is a key part of the resident experience. It’s also a major pain point for you, as a manager, if it’s unsuccessfully managed. You’re giving up a lot when you pass full control of parking management over to a third-party company.
An enforcement company that agrees to do parking patrol for you will almost always bring in their own decals and/or signage. They might also use their own system of tracking residents vs. guests and assigned vs. unassigned spaces. This takes the responsibility off your plate. However, when you inevitably move on to a new patrol company, they’ll take their solution with them, leaving you empty-handed and in the dark.
This causes managers to sometimes settle for poor enforcement services because they don’t want to deal with the headache of changing to a new parking management system.
To avoid this issue, parking data should belong to you.
Let’s use Quickbooks as an example. If you hire someone to do your taxes for you, you don’t want them to own your Quickbooks account should you ever need to find a new bookkeeper. Let’s say you do hire someone new; you simply need to give them access to your account and there’s no need to start over completely. With a platform like Parking Boss, you can add enforcement or tow partners as users with access to only the information that is relevant to their role.
To keep parking as fair and consistent as possible, you should know what’s going on.
Giving over parking to a third party relinquishes your ability to maintain quality control over the relationship between patrol and residents. If the company doesn’t value customer service or timeliness in responses, this can lead to frustrated residents.
Without a clear leadership method, consistency is hard to achieve. Assuming control, on the other hand, allows you to keep the same system regardless of who you partner with and maintain a keen awareness of enforcement practices.
How does your enforcement company report to their enforcement efforts? How do they monitor permits, track citations, and recall information? Some companies may offer you handwritten paper reports, or worse, none at all. When you’re not managing the system, how do you know when a violation has occurred or when patrol has happened?
With a platform like Parking Boss, you see all user activity on your account. You can grant access to your individual enforcement partners and see the history of all recorded violations including date & timestamps, along with any photos that are attached for evidence. This keeps everyone accountable and on the same page.
To sum it all up, you should take ownership of your community’s parking program so you can 1) be in charge of how parking is managed, 2) always keep the parking data, and 3) maintain consistency and awareness of what’s going on. Don’t let enforcement companies dictate how your parking management system is run. Take control with a reliable parking platform like Parking Boss.
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