Are your HOA parking rules too confusing? Do you have an effective way to enforce your parking policies? If you’re in the process of updating your HOA’s parking rules, bylaws, or CC&Rs (Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions), a parking management software solution like Parking Boss, a product of Community Boss, can help simplify your parking.
Parking software doesn’t have to be complicated or confusing. In fact, it’s often easier to manage than paper-and-pen methods or spreadsheets. We want to help you create the best plan of action to enforce parking in your community.
Your parking policies will best serve their purposes if you keep them simple, limit time by home, and customize rules to the specific needs of your community.
Keep Your HOA’s Parking Rules Clear and Simple
It can be hard to keep the peace while upholding the parking rules, especially if they’re complicated or leave any room for interpretation. When you decide to update your parking rules, bylaws, or CC&RS, keep your policies simple, specific, and confusion-free.
- Clarify which vehicles are and are not allowed
- Specify where homeowners may or may not park
- Set a specific limit on how long and during which hours vehicles may be parked in certain spaces
We recommend avoiding rules that allow a car to move to another space after its parking time is up — a game that residents and guests like to call “musical cars.” For example, if your parking rules only state that a guest can park for 48 hours at a time, the guest can simply shuffle their car around to a new spot whenever their time runs out. Instead, set per-home time limits to promote more fairness.
Overnight Parking with Guest Parking Permits
Do you have a plan for overnight parking? You’ll want to define overnight hours, especially if you restrict overnight parking in certain spaces. Without parking permits or someone patrolling during those hours, it’s difficult to tell if cars are there for a few hours or the entire night. To help everyone follow the rules, clearly outline the steps a homeowner should take to permit their guest vehicles.
Limit Guest Parking Time Per-Home
Many communities only limit parking times by vehicle as an easy way to keep cars from parking too long. The disadvantage of this is that residents can park in guest spaces, and residents who frequently have guests over can monopolize the spaces. The result is that other people can’t offer their visitor a guest space if it’s always occupied.
Is there a better way? Set per-home limits for guest parking instead. For example, if 20% of your parking is reserved for guests, we suggest offering 7-10 days per month of guest time. With virtual guest parking permits, guests can only register for the allowed amount of time. In the end, it’s more fair for everyone, even if it means the popular guy can’t take up all the spaces that he used to secure for his guests.
Do you have parking rules that aren’t being enforced? Or are you struggling to figure out how to enforce your parking policies? Don’t just copy what you see working for other HOA communities. Parking Boss can help you define the policies you need and ensure they make sense to your residents.
When putting new rules into place, we recommend that you allot a conservative amount of time to each home. If parking improves in the following weeks or months and there’s plenty of guest spaces to go around, extend the guest hours you offer to each home. This lets you be the hero of parking rather than the villain who takes guest time away.
If you want to simplify your guest parking for the sake of the board and residents, you’ll find the software to make it happen in Parking Boss. Guests can gain a digital permit without needing prior approval or paperwork, and your parking rules are automatically enforced through the online Parking Attendant.
Prioritize Fairness with Parking Enforcement
Parking enforcement allows everyone to be treated the same. Do you struggle with some residents accruing repeated violations while others seem to always slide by without any warnings? You can prevent unfair enforcement with a reliable record of all parking violations and warnings issued. Parking Boss makes it easy to record and track violations by automatically saving them in the system.
Once you’ve set a clear threshold for how many warnings can be given before a violation and how many violations can be issued before towing, you can keep everybody on the same playing field. By establishing clear thresholds and letting the software store violation information for you, you reduce the risk of favoritism or discrimination.
Maintain Resident Parking
Do residents have too many cars? Are they parking in guest zones? Perhaps residents aren’t parking in their garages when they’re supposed to. How do you handle this? With Parking Boss, you can set a vehicle limit per household and offer resident vehicle decals, like Smart Decals.
Smart Parking Decals
Smart Decals are easy to assign and activate. Simply enter the vehicle, home, and contact information, along with the decal number into the software. Now, when the vehicle information is scanned or searched in the software by an approved patrol or tow partner, parking committee member, or admin, this information will be displayed.
Plus, you’ll always know how many resident vehicles are in your community since Parking Boss stores all of this information in an easy-to-use database for all admin users.
Offer Pay-to-Park Options
If you have residents who want to keep extra cars or grab another spot for their adult-aged children, why not offer a paid option? In fact, why not create extra revenue from paid parking! Issue a different colored decal to differentiate these vehicles and allow them to access street parking. These color-coded decals make it easier for parking enforcement agents and admin to identify if vehicles are authorized to park.
Enforce Your HOA’s Community Rules
HOA parking enforcement can be simple with software. Is your community smaller than 100 units? Do you have an HOA member who wants to patrol parking? If so, you can save on expenses with self-managed parking enforcement. However, if you have a larger community or no time to self-patrol, you can reduce out-of-pocket expenses by offering paid decals for extra resident vehicles or paid guest parking.
The right software, like Parking Boss, makes enforcement easy since it organizes all the information on registered vehicles and vehicle histories.
Set Up Your Own Parking Rules With Our Free Template
Have you been struggling to update your HOA parking rules and enforcement plans? Parking doesn’t have to be complicated. Your community’s needs are unique and we want to help you find the best parking solution for your community.
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