Stellos Research · Asset Class · Mixed Use

Shared Use Parking in Mixed Use Assets

In a single use building, a parking spot has one job and one tenant. In a mixed use building it can have several, because residents, employees, visitors and retail customers want the same parking spot at different hours. When demand profiles are offset rather than simultaneous, one physical parking spot serves more than one user a day. That is the difference between counting parking spots and counting capacity, and it is where a large part of mixed use parking value hides.

Stellos operates live parking optimisation across Switzerland and Germany for real estate owners, investors and corporates. Stellos parking platform · trusted by Google, Swisscom, Implenia, Wincasa, CWS and Sony.

1. Complementary demand: the core mechanism

Residential parking peaks overnight and on weekends. Office and retail parking peaks on weekday daytimes. In a building that holds both, the two curves are largely complementary: as residents leave in the morning, employees and customers arrive; as the working day ends, residents return. The parking spots a resident vacates at 08:00 are exactly the inventory a daytime user needs, and the handover reverses each evening.

Because the peaks do not coincide, the building does not need one parking spot per simultaneous claim. It needs enough parking spots to cover the combined peak, which is materially lower than the sum of each use measured alone. Sizing parking by adding up single use ratios systematically overbuilds a mixed use asset.

2. From parking spots to effective capacity

The practical measure is a utilisation factor: how many distinct users a single physical parking spot serves across a day. In a well balanced mixed use asset that factor commonly lands in the range of 1.5 to 1.8, and a large share of residential parking spots, on the order of 60 to 65%, can be reused for daytime commercial demand without ever leaving a resident without a space when they need one.

The effect on effective capacity is significant. A garage with 100 physical parking spots and a utilisation factor of 1.6 serves daily demand closer to 160 parking spot uses. Put differently, an owner can satisfy the parking needs of a programme that, on a naive single use count, would appear to require far more parking spots than the building actually contains. That gap is what lets owners either reduce a planned ramp, release floor area to a higher value use, or keep the parking spots and monetise the spare capacity.

These ranges describe well balanced mixed use assets in aggregate. The factor for any specific building depends on its exact use mix, tenant hours, and how access is managed, which is what a property level audit measures.

3. The NOI levers that shared use unlocks

Once a building is run as shared capacity rather than fixed assignments, several levers open up, none of which require new construction.

Pooled allocation

Instead of welding each parking spot to one tenant, parking spots join a managed pool. Residents keep guaranteed access in their peak window; daytime users draw on the spare inventory under defined entry and exit rules. The same parking spot earns from two sources rather than one. Stellos runs exactly this pooled model for Swiss owners, and it is the operational core of the platform.

Converting compromised parking spots to storage

Most garages carry a tail of parking spots that underperform as parking: behind columns, in an awkward second row, or hard to manoeuvre into. Converted to sealed, fire compliant storage lockers, those same square metres can earn more than they ever did as parking, while the physical parking spot stays available as reserve capacity if real demand ever returns. It is one of the cleanest value engineering moves in a mixed use garage.

Occupancy based and behavioural pricing

Shared inventory pairs naturally with pricing that rewards lower car use. One scheme increasingly applied to corporate daytime parking charges a solo driver the full daily rate, a two person car half, and a car of three or more nothing at all. It shrinks the peak that sizing is driven by, frees inventory for other users, and aligns the asset with the mobility goals planners now expect. See the dynamic pricing playbook for the mechanics.

4. Why this matters for Swiss permitting

Swiss parking provision is set by cantonal and communal norms, and in many densifying locations the planning pressure is toward fewer private parking spots, not more. Cantonal densification principles, such as Ticino's Sviluppo Centripeto di Qualità, explicitly favour compact, transit oriented development. Shared use is the honest way to provide for real demand with fewer dedicated parking spots, because it provisions for how the building actually behaves rather than for a worst case that never occurs simultaneously.

Two cautions keep this credible rather than wishful:

• Bicycle minimums are set in law, not by sharing. Many communes require on the order of two bicycle spaces per apartment, and oppositions sometimes push further. Adding a bike share scheme does not reduce a mandated bike parking spot count; the requirement is a fixed input, not a lever.
• Trip generation ceilings are a separate test. Where a site is capped by a vehicles per hour threshold, the binding constraint is movements, not parking spots, and the case has to be made on traffic modelling, not parking maths alone.

Treated this way, shared use is a planning argument an owner can defend in front of an authority, not a number to be explained away later.

5. Modelling it: two scenarios, one risk decision

Because the rules separate residential and commercial parking, the cleanest way to size a mixed use scheme is to model two scenarios side by side:

The distance between the two scenarios is the prize, and also the development risk. Selling parking spots as divided while intending to manage them as a pool is a risk an owner can choose to take or not, but it should be a priced, deliberate decision, not an accident of how the ramp was drawn. Modelling both makes that choice explicit.

6. Reading your own mixed use asset

The ranges here describe the asset class. The factor for a specific building depends on its use mix, tenant hours, transit access and local norm. The Stellos audit reads an address and its programme and estimates where on this distribution the asset sits, which parking spots are genuinely shareable, and which lever, pooling, storage conversion, or pricing, carries the most upside for that building.