Spacer Index uncovers more than 95,000 empty non-street parking spaces in homes, multifamily communities, hotels, and commercial buildings, representing the next frontier for the sharing economy.
Spacer Technologies, the platform powering alternate asset marketplaces in across North America and in Australia, today released its initial Spacer Index. The index reveals that despite San Francisco’s reputation for parking scarcity, the city has nearly 100,000 spaces that sit vacant during work hours with an annual rental value of $287,010,000.
“One of the major disconnects in the parking industry is that even as people talk about how difficult it is to find places to put cars, there are literally tens of thousands of spaces available in every American city,” says Jeremy Zuker, Spacer Technologies’ CEO for North America. “We wanted to figure out what the value of all of those spaces is, and we were shocked by just how much available inventory is out there. Every unused space represents a lost revenue opportunity for homeowners and businesses who could be renting it out to people who need to park. It’s also inefficient and wasteful when we have technology to increase utilization.”
The index calculated the total number of San Francisco parking spaces that go unused during regular business hours and ascribed an average monthly cost of $250 per space. “It is common for spaces to go for $350 per month or more in the downtown core but we looked at prices across the entire city because we didn’t want to inflate the total value,” Zuker says. “We also didn’t include any street spaces, public lots, or garages in class A commercial buildings because we wanted to come up with a realistic number. As it turns out, even with our conservative approach the annual rental value is more than a quarter of a billion dollars in San Francisco alone.”
The Spacer Index is based on the total number of spaces in hotels, religious institutions, multifamily properties, single-family homes multifamily buildings, and class B and class C commercial buildings in the City of San Francisco. Vacancy rates for each of these categories were applied based on public data and a total dollar value was derived.
Zuker says that “in many ways, this is a perfect match for the sharing economy – there are thousands of underutilized spaces in San Francisco that can be rented to create passive income for owners and represent a convenient and affordable parking spaces for drivers. The missing piece is in the marketplace for information exchange and the tools that make renting easy for anyone. Our platforms have been successfully doing this for years and we think that we have just scratched the surface.”
About Spacer Technologies
Known as the “Airbnb of the Alternate Asset Space,” Spacer powers household brands in the parking (www.parkhound.com.au, www.spacer.com) and self-storage (www.spacer.com.au) verticals. Spacer works with brand name REITs, hotels, commercial and residential property owners to lease out space online, on-demand. Its subsidiary, WhereiPark (WIP) (www.whereipark.com), operates parking marketplaces across 15 metro areas in North America. WIP focuses on the B2B and B2B2C sector and works with brand-name suppliers and national multifamily property owners including Brookfield Properties, UDR Apartments, AvalonBay Communities, and Greystar.