An office garage that sits empty in the evening: what can you do with it?

An office building with its own parking garage uses that garage, roughly speaking, about eight hours on a workday, and almost nothing in the evening, at weekends, or during a holiday closure. The rest of the time, the exact same capacity that might even be tight during the day sits completely idle. That's not an exception; it's the default situation at nearly every business building with its own garage.

Same pattern as a VvE, different clock

In a VvE garage, spots sit empty because residents are at work during the day. In a business garage, it's exactly the reverse: spots are full between nine and five, and empty at every other time. The underlying problem is identical: capacity tied to one fixed group, while demand for parking peaks at completely different moments. At a pilot building with homes, that same approach already produced 700+ bookings and 8,000+ shared hours, without adding a single spot. The principle doesn't change once "residents" become colleagues.

Not a marketplace: a closed group that sets its own rules

This isn't a proposal to open the garage to strangers. It works with the same closed-group setup that's also the basis for a VvE: a screened-off environment for a fixed group of people you choose yourselves: employees of your own business, or an arrangement with a neighbouring business that needs capacity precisely in the evening or at weekends. The business decides who gets access; nothing changes about who can park where without that being a deliberate choice.

What changes in practice

• For visitors and flexible workers during the day. A spot a fixed employee doesn't use in the afternoon becomes temporarily available for a visitor or someone who's only in the office a few days a week, without needing a separate arrangement for it.
• For evenings and weekends. A garage that locks up at five could instead stay open for whoever needs to be where the business is located in the evening, for a nearby event, say, or for neighbours if the business chooses to.
• For multiple businesses in the same building or street. Two businesses with opposite peak times (an office during the day, a gym in the evening) can use the same spots at different times, without either one needing to rent extra capacity.

How to set this up in practice

The setup is the same as for a VvE: your own screened-off environment, an admin who arranges things, and employees or partner businesses who log in via a link, no app install, no password. That process doesn't fundamentally change between a residential building and an office building; only the group that gets access is different.

Want to know if this works for your building? Get in touch for a no-obligation conversation.