Stellos Research · Regulation · Basel-Stadt

Basel's Parking Change of Use: Renting Office Parking Spots to Residents

By Stellos Research · May 2026

Most Swiss cantons treat a private parking spot as single-purpose: it belongs to the building and its users, full stop. Basel-Stadt is doing something different, actively encouraging the multi-use of private parking, so that an office or company garage idle at night and on weekends can be opened to residents and commuters. Stellos (operating as ShareP) runs the flagship project under this programme, and it turns an off-peak inefficiency into a sanctioned, monetisable opportunity for owners.

This article describes a public cantonal programme using sourced public information, including projects operated by ShareP (now Stellos). It is general market research, not legal advice, confirm the current rules and any approval requirements with Kanton Basel-Stadt or qualified counsel before acting.

1. What Basel-Stadt is actually doing

Under its parking strategy, Kanton Basel-Stadt promotes the Mehrfachnutzung (multi-use) of private parking: rather than build new public capacity, the canton encourages owners of existing private parking spots to make them available to additional user groups at the times they would otherwise sit empty. The model is simple and complementary: commuters book office/company parking spots on weekdays during the day; residents and neighbourhood visitors use the same parking spots evenings and weekends. The canton names two parking platforms enabling this; ShareP, now Stellos, is the one behind the programme's flagship sites.

The first multi-use pilot went live in September 2025 at Hochstrasse 16, where PSP Swiss Property makes around fifty underground parking spots available for daily and weekly rental through the ShareP (Stellos) app, the largest of the canton's live projects. Stellos also operates the multi-use offering at Peter Merian-Strasse 58. Across the programme, Basel-Stadt reports four private multi-use projects in operation, monitored over two years as the basis for wider rollout. The direction of travel is clear: the canton wants existing private capacity used more efficiently, and is actively enabling owners to do it.

2. Why this is a meaningful regulatory edge

Across most of Switzerland, an owner who wants to commercialise idle private parking spots runs into a thicket of zoning and use-restriction questions. Basel-Stadt has deliberately cleared a path: multi-use is not a grey-area workaround there, it is a canton-backed objective with live precedents and institutional participants such as PSP Swiss Property. That changes the risk calculus for an owner, the question shifts from "is this allowed?" to "how much is our idle capacity worth?", and Stellos is already operating inside that framework today.

3. The owner's opportunity

The economics mirror the office and event cases, with a regulatory tailwind. A company garage at, say, 53% weekday-daytime utilisation has the same parking spot sitting empty roughly every evening and all weekend. Opening that window to residents, who in dense Basel neighbourhoods face genuine scarcity of overnight parking, converts dead inventory into a recurring income line, while easing pressure on public parking, which is the canton's policy goal. The owner monetises; the city gets more efficient use of existing capacity without new construction. It is a rare alignment of private return and public interest.

What it takes to participate

• Idle capacity, predictable empty windows (evenings, weekends, or the reverse for residential-to-commuter).
• Access control, a way to grant time-bounded access to secondary users without compromising the primary tenant, typically ANPR or app-based.
• A pricing and booking model for the secondary user group.
• Confirmation of the current cantonal requirements for the specific site.

4. A template other cantons will likely follow

Basel-Stadt is ahead, not alone. Pressure on urban parking, sustainability targets, and the obvious waste of idle private capacity point the same direction across Swiss cities. Owners who understand the multi-use economics now, where their idle windows are, what they are worth, what access model unlocks them, will be ready to act as the regulatory door opens in their canton too. Basel is the proof of concept for a model with national logic.

5. Sizing the opportunity for a specific asset

How much an owner's idle capacity is worth depends on location, the size of the empty window, and local secondary-user demand. The Stellos audit estimates that for a specific address, reading the same demand signals, area type, residential density, transit, that determine whether a multi-use programme would fill the parking spots and at what rate. For context, the Stellos 2026 benchmark puts median asset-value uplift from parking optimisation at roughly CHF 135,000 per 100 parking spots; multi-use is one of the most direct routes to it where regulation permits. And in Basel specifically, Stellos does not just size the opportunity, through its ShareP operation it runs the live multi-use sites, from PSP Swiss Property's Hochstrasse 16 garage to Peter Merian-Strasse 58.