The new form of commercial property has been fuelled by demographic changes, which have squeezed storage in some high-density areas, while ensuring space to spare in the growing number of single person households.

And it could become a bigger business if the State Government acts on a discussion paper by the Planning Department that calls for free parking at shopping centres to be phased out. The paper calls for a cap on parking at retail and business centres across metropolitan Perth to promote public transport.

The Department of Transport warned that it was already monitoring the fledgling trend to rent out parking spots to ensure it did not breach regulations.

It said the practice was illegal in the central city area unless the site’s planning approval allowed it, it had been specifically approved by the Transport Minister, or the building received planning approval before July 1999. Breaches attracted hefty penalties of $5000.

Legal rentals were typically in apartment complexes, usually on the outskirts of the city or in the suburbs.

Renting Out Parking Space

Filmmaker Alice Ross said she decided to rent out her undercover parking spot at her Northbridge investment unit when her tenants told her they would not need it.

Rather than waste the space, she is offering it for $50 a week through Gumtree, a free local advertising website.

“It’s so easy because you don’t have to do anything except give the new tenants the key,” Ms Ross said.

Renting Out Storage Space

Residents are also turning spare rooms, garages and sheds into commercial units by renting them out as storage space, usually for $200 a month.

Andy Henderson, technical director of the Space Out website, said increasing density had put a premium on space, turning it into a handy profit-earner.

He said empty-nesters were embracing the trend, clearing out spare rooms to rent for storage.

Websites that advertise storage space offered options, including sea containers, indoor rooms, or outdoor sheds.

There was a premium on indoor facilities and rooms that could be locked and rooms that the renter could get access to independently.

“It’s literally a way to make money out of thin air,” Mr Henderson said. “It’s money for nothing.” OUT OF THIN AIR $200 The amount (a week) some empty-nesters are said to be earning by renting out spare rooms for storage.

As featured on The West

Paid parking was introduced this week at Chermside Shopping Center – with plans to implement it at Westfield Carindale in March next year.

The new parking charges at Westfield Chermside have had an immediate impact – leaving empty car parks and resulting in clogged local streets, increased traffic congestion, and the need for a local services club to employ security guards to monitor their own car park.

Parking Fees $20 per day

The new charges, which apply to vehicles parked for 3 hours or more, are designed to encourage commuters and long term parkers to look at alternatives.  Parking fees can be as much as $20 for the day.

Shopping Center staff have been allocated special parking areas, but have complained of half hour waits to get in, and are concerned that they will be forced to pay up to $20 a day if they miss out on one of the staff parking spaces.

Local Residents Cash In

Aside from the extra disruption and congestion being faced by local residents, some may actually be presented with an opportunity to earn some extra income.  Some residents with a spare parking spot have already been approached by car owners offering to pay to park there.  Home or business owners with an extra parking space in the driveway, garage, or yard may find that they are in demand, and can rent out their unused parking space on a casual, weekly or even monthly basis – with the potential to earn as much as $15 a day or $300 a month.

Students and ferry-riding professionals are renting out unneeded parking spots for up to $550 a month.

Money Out of Thin Air

Brisbane has long been a hot spot for SpaceOut members and ordinary Australians with unused space in their home or business are making good money by renting it out for storage, office use as well as parking – and are literally making money out of thin air.

In Brisbane (and many other Australian capital cities), demand for inner-city carpark in space has created a mini property boom as spare parking bays in city highrises and apartment blocks become prime rental spaces.

The average cost of renting a park in Brisbane now stands at $435 a month – or $43.50 a square metre – after growing 30 per cent a year since 2005.

One great advantage of renting your own parking space is that you get 24×7 access and can come and go as you please. Although more than $400 a month may seem light a lot to pay for parking, it is actually a bargain when compared to casual parking rates which are charged every time come or go.

Last year SpaceOut Highlighted in our City drive-in robbery – Brisbane carpark costs soar post that Brisbane drivers wishing to park in the city were  paying on average $45 a day (that’s over $200 a week), and the rates have continued to rise…. currently  Brisbane casual parking can cost up to $70 a day.

Collaborative Consumption

Renting out your unused parking space – or a spare bedroom for storage – or an unused corner or room at your workplace is a great example of the increasingly popular collaborative consumption movement, where people “share” resources.  For the space owner, it is a great way to earn some extra income, and for the space renter it is a great way to find a rental space that is cheap and convenient, and to save money on commercial rental rates.

SpaceOut provides a service which makes it easy for people with spare or unused space, to list and rent it out to those who need the space.

After London, Oslo and Tokyo, Sydney was already the world’s fourth dearest city to park, but now the cost of meter parking in the city is set to rise even higher – to $7 an hour.

The NSW Government levy (which was doubled by the state labour government in 2009) forces hotels, councils and commercial carparks to pay up to $2040 a space every year.  The tax was supposed to discourage daily commuter traffic congestion in the Sydney CBD, however, because it is only imposed on offsite parking, it tends to encourage commuters to drive around until they find a kerbside park, which actually adds to the congestion.

Parking meter costs

At $7 per hour Sydney on street parking fees are the highest of all other major cities in Australia.  The next most expensive cities are Melbourne and Brisbane (at a maximum rate of $4 per hour), with Perth a little lower at $3.30 per hour, and Adelaide the cheapest at just 2.40 per hour for CBD parking.

So for on-street parking in Australian major city CBD’s (assuming you are actually allowed to park for more than an hour) you are looking at paying anywhere between $20 and $60 for the day.

Parking Station Fees

For off-street parking, or parking in commercial parking stations you can expect to pay significantly more (even in many cases at “early bird” rates), with Sydney CBD parking station rates costing up to $35 and hour or $142 per day. If you want the luxury of being able to come and go from, your parking spot as you please, you would normally expect to pay many hundreds of dollars a month.

The huge increase in costs associated with parking in Australian CBDs is fueling the demand for Private parking services like that being offered BY SpaceOut.  Spaecout provides a service that allows individuals and businesses with a spare parking space in areas of high demand, to rent it out to those desperately needing parking, but unable to justify the ever increasing costs of commercial parking services.  The parking space owner, turns their unused parking space into a regular income, and the commuter gets convenient and cheaper parking – often with 24×7 access.

See what’s currently available right now by clicking one of the links below :

• Sydney Parking Spaces for rent
• Melbourne Parking Spaces for Rent
• Brisbane Parking Spaces for rent
• Perth Parking Spaces for Rent

Park Circa coordinates a community of members who are either looking for a parking space or have parking facilities available. Members are able to list their driveway parking space as available when it’s not in use — earning cash when someone uses their spot. The payment method is on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ system, where drivers top-up credit on their Park Circa account. This is then transferred to the owner of the parking space the driver selects, with the hourly rates decided by the spaces’ owners. Members are able to view available parking spaces and complete payment via the Park Circa mobile app.

The service is currently running as a beta program in San Francisco, but has plans to expand globally.

Dr Cresswell calculated that if the average time shopping is 3 hours, and allowing for other factors, then the maximum wait time in a block of 30 cars will be no longer than 6 minutes. So by just ‘hovering’ by a large block of cars with a little patience, anyone can find  spot!

Chris Urquhart from Chanel 9′s A Current Affair tried the math out in typical end-of-year shopping centre carpark mayhem recently, and found the usual wait time using the technique in fact to be just 2 to 3 minutes!

This mathematically proven formula puts to rest many of the myths about finding parking, and turns out to be easier than most of them!!  Us scientifically-minded souls here at SpaceOut will be trying this technique out this Christmas. Let us know if the technique works for you too!!

In stark contrast to this,  a company in Paris is using similar sensors to help motorists find empty parking spaces.  Paris-based SmartGrains install in-ground sensors  which automatically detect the presence of a vehicle, allowing them to infer whether or not there is a vehicle in a particular spot. The sensors are connected in a wireless radio network, allowing each one to report whenever a parking spot becomes free. Drivers, can then use the free ParkSense iPhone app to see  what parking spots are available nearby.

Australian city councils claim they are not using parking sensors as a revenue generator, but are trying to provide “fairer” parking so that motorists are able to share the available parking spaces better.  If they were serious about this altruistic approach to parking, surely they could use this parking sensor technology for good rather then evil, and implement a similar “available parking spaces ” service to that being provided in Paris.

Find and share parking

Online services like  Google Open Spot which have been around for some time, can help motorists find a place to park, but these services rely on other users notifying the service when a parking spot is free.  Open Spot works by letting people who are leaving parking spots share their spots with people who are searching for parking, however this service  is currently only available in the US, Canada, and the Netherlands and requires Android 2.0 or higher.

Although SpaceOut is currently mainly geared towards long term parking space rental, it is still possible to find short term or daily parking space listings in certain areas.

Automated Parking Infringement Sensors

The latest automatic parking sensors are being fitted to both free and paid car parking bays throughout Australia and NZ.  Theses sensors take a photo (including a timestamp) when your car arrives and if you stay longer than the maximum time (whether or not you have a valid parking ticket), will electronically notify the nearest parking patrol. Theses devices automatically take photos of offending vehicles with the time and date of the infringement recorded on the image.

The new system detects a vehicle’s presence in a designated area, recording its arrival and departure time – including vehicle overstays, through the use of sensors embedded in the parking bay. Information gathered is transmitted to the parking Officer’s PDA, when walking or driving near the parking space.  the parking officer can also be notified of nearby spaces that are close to reaching their limits.

Gone are the days of chalking tyres – parking Officers are now only needed to enter vehicle specific details -  with location and offence details automatically populated directly from the vehicle detection sensors in the ground.  It seems to me that a fully automated solution is not far off, so that days of parking officers may very well be numbered as well.  If I were a parking officer, I would be very concerned about how long my job was going to last for.

Council Parking Revenue

Unsurprisingly local councils are at pains to stress that this move is NOT a revenue raiser.  They “selflessly” claim that they are installing these devices simply to encourage people to limit their parking to  allotted times – resulting in greater sharing of the parking space and a fairer service to all motorists – yeah right.

Advertising materials for the product manufacturers clearly highlight the increased revenue benefits of installing their product – providing a case study citing figures for a potential increase in revenue of over 120% for a single parking area.

Sydney’s Lane Cove Council is the latest council to start using the technology, with 200 of the meter eyes about to be switched on.

550 parking sensors have been installed around Perth at a cost of $400,000, and they have already paid for themselves, whilst ramping up revenue 57%.

Devices of this type are already in use (or being tested) by councils all over Australia and NZ, including:

• ACT Ranger Services
• Adelaide City Council
• Auckland City Council
• Brisbane City Council
• City of Melbourne
• City of Perth
• City of Sydney
• North Sydney Council
• Waverley Council

Whilst the altruistic sentiment of “sharing” parking spaces seems reasonable, it’s hard to see this trend as anything but yet another thinly camouflaged money grabbing strategy by councils.

The best approach to parking, and the safest way to ensure you are not hit by hefty parking fees or exorbitant parking fines is still to secure your own private parking space.  SpaceOut, remains one of the easiest way for you to locate or rent out your own private car parking space, at a very reasonable price.

Channel Nine’s A Current Affair program ran a story tonight about the horrendous prices being charged by Parking Stations throughout Australia.

Airport Parking, Hospital parking, and especially CBD parking stations are charging exorbitant prices – adding a huge extra expense to your day out.

In Sydney you will need to pay up to $40 for 4 hours parking and in Brisbane you should expect to pay up to $61. Melbourne will set you back $54 for a 4 hour stay.

To make it worse, some parking stations highlight “special offers” from just $2 or $5. But unless you are very careful to read the fine print and abide by strict conditions, it is quite possible you will be slugged for between $30 and $50 for parking just 1-2 hrs.

Airports and Hospitals are also notorious for their parking fees, and because in many cases there is no other choice but to pay for parking, people are often forced to cut their visits short 0 – in order to9 try and reduce the costs.

If you are looking for casual parking, sites like CarParking.info are available to help you to find Cheap Parking.  They also offer a Free iphone  App which you can use while you are out and about amd on the prowl for cheap parking.

But of course, if you are looking for cheap longer term parking, you can search for Parking Spaces for rent on SpaceOut.com.au

See the ACA Story – Parking Fury

“Parking in Brisbane has become more than a headache, with some motorists slugged over $20 an hour for parking in the city”

As part of a nationwide investigation it has become clear that Brisbane parking rates are amongst the worst in Australia.  Brisbane drivers wishing to park in the city pay on average $45 a day (that’s over $200 a week).  Brisbane parking station fees are on a par with Melbourne (also $45 a day), and are more expensive than other Capital cities, except for Sydney where you can expect to pay up to $72 a day for parking.  Darwin, is the cheapest capital city to park, with fees as low as $2.40 per day at some inner city carparks.

The table below provides an overview of the parking fees for some of Brisbane’s largest commercial carparks (as of Sep 2010) :

Another big “money grab”  used by some of the commercial carpark operators is the policy of applying an extra fee if a motorist loses their ticket. In Brisbane you should expect to pay up to $66 for to park your car for the day if you can’t find your parking ticket.

Jim Kershaw a spokesman from the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland (RACQ)  suggested that because of the high parking costs, many people parked outside the CBD and caught public transport, and said :

“In a perfect world there would be cheap parking for everyone”

SpaceOut – offers a cheap and convenient solution to motorists looking for alternatives to the high cost parking offered by commercial operators in city CBDs.  People can often find a much cheaper parking option by renting an unused private parking space or garage.  People living or working in (or near) the CBD, who have a parking space but no car, can also make a bit of extra cash by renting out their space .