Stellos Playbook · Office

How Much Is Your Empty Office Parking Costing You?

Let me tell you about a cost that never shows up on an invoice, never sets off an alarm, and is almost always larger than people think. The cost of empty office parking. And to show you how real it is, let me start with a little story about a man and an evening walk through his own garage.

Stellos operates parking technology across Switzerland and Germany, trusted by teams at Google, Swisscom, Implenia, Wincasa, CWS and Sony.

The bill with no invoice

He was a property manager, and a little after six most evenings he walked the levels and counted. More than half the spots were empty, as they had been since mid-afternoon, as they were every Friday, as they had been since the office went hybrid. Nothing was beeping. No line item said "waste." And that, exactly, is why this cost is so easy to miss.

Here is the uncomfortable truth he eventually did the math on: he paid for every one of those spots whether a car sat in it or not. A share of rent, the maintenance, the time spent managing it, all unchanged, while the hours those spots actually worked had quietly collapsed. A garage running at half utilisation is paying full price for spots that work part-time. Nothing on the books is labelled "idle parking," but the money is gone all the same.

The empty spots were also unearned income

Then, walking back, he noticed something else. The visitor bays were full. Outside, people hunted the street for evening and weekend space, the very space his half-empty garage could have been selling. So those idle hours were not only a cost, they were unrealised income, sitting there waiting for nearby demand. I sized that opportunity for the hybrid era in office parking ROI in the hybrid-work era.

Why it compounds faster than you would expect

And here is the part that surprises owners most: recovered parking income flows almost entirely into net operating income, and at commercial cap rates even a modest annual NOI gain lifts the asset's value by a multiple of itself. The mechanics are in our ROI and NOI methodology.

He could not fix what he had not measured

So the next morning he did the one sensible thing first. He quantified it: how many spots, how they were used across the week, what they cost, and what the idle capacity was worth. Let me show you the same thing for your property. For the wider picture, this is one piece of office parking management.