Parket is a locally developed online platform that connects drivers who need to park their cars for a few hours or a day with available parking bays, while also providing parking-bay owners with an additional revenue stream.

The app utilises contactless technology, such as licence plate recognition and QR codes.

Cape Town’s City Park ­– the former Christiaan Barnard hospital – is one of Parket’s customers whose parking revenue has doubled in the past six months, albeit against the backdrop of a rebounding regional economy.

“If we look at City Park, as an example, we are managing 750 bays on our system,” says Parket founder and CTO Joshua Raphael.

“Of that number, our data analysis showed that up to 100 of those parking bays used to sit vacant all year round.” 

Raphael explains that Parket provides landlords or tenants with a user dashboard to manage and monetise their parking spaces better. This means that they can pick up trends in parking demand and decline in an easy, data-driven manner. 

Parket’s dashboard will, for example, tell landlords how many bays remain empty at any given time. This can be owing to staff rotation, and hybrid and remote working.

This data can then be used to sell those unused bays to casual parkers on an hourly or daily basis – ‘overselling’ –  thereby creating an additional income stream.

“Let’s say there are hundreds of bays and the parkade is not filled to capacity, we could, for argument’s sake, effectively oversell a hundred of those bays and bring in up to R150 000 a month, every month,” says Raphael.

Landlords can also save on capital expenditure as a result of negating the need for pay-point machines and the associated maintenance costs that go with them, as physical cash collection becomes a thing of the past.

Raphael adds that Parket works similar to an online and real-time hotel booking system.

The platform is able to manage layers of complexity, such as a number of people booking parking at the same time from different sources (for example the Web or the app), while tenants or landlords also designate parking to their own customers.

Users can check for parking space and book ahead of time, or as they approach a parkade, notes Raphael.

A registered Parket user who has booked via the app will then simply drive up to the parkade’s boom, which will automatically open through number plate recognition, following which they will drive to an open bay.

Or, if a building tenant has a once-off visitor, a QR access code can be sent via text or instant messaging for access without the need to download the app.

Parket does not determine the pricing. Motorists pay the fee that facilities have set prior to adopting Parket’s system.

The Parket app has a built-in payment system that calculates the time spent in the bay after the motor vehicle's licence plate is read as it exits the parking lot. 

“Switching to a smart parking management platform reduces the endless coasting and carbon emissions associated with vehicles looking for parking, while also eradicating consumables such as paper tickets,” notes Raphael.

Parket is currently only operational at parking facilities in the Cape Town central business district.