When a listing says 85 percent occupancy but the parker count implies half that, ask the broker to define the term

Question

Take a surface lot near a hospital, 50 striped spaces. The broker's one-pager might headline "85% occupancy," while the seller's income summary further down lists only 22 monthly parkers at $95, which is 44 percent of the spaces. The rest of the revenue line is labeled simply "transient." The likely explanation is that occupancy in a parking listing usually measures utilization across the day, counting transient turns as well as monthly parkers, not a snapshot of how full the lot is at any one moment. That is not necessarily deceptive, but it does mean the 85 percent figure and the durable, contracted income are two different things. Worth asking the broker for: the actual daily transaction count and average ticket by day of week for at least the trailing twelve months. A breakdown of monthly parker revenue versus transient revenue by month, to see seasonality and how much of the number is durable. And a real expense schedule, since the assumption that parking runs near 80 percent margins because there is little to maintain often understates costs like management, security, striping, and property tax reassessment on sale.

Rena Guide · Answer

Occupancy and usage rate get swapped around in listings and they aren't the same measure. Occupancy is how full the lot is at a single moment, so 85% occupancy means roughly 42 of your 50 spaces had a car in them when somebody stood there and counted. Usage rate is usually cars per space per day, which counts turnover, so a busy lot near an ER can show a figure over 100% without ever being full. An 85% headline is almost always a peak weekday hour, not an average across the week, and it tells you very little about Sunday at 6am.

Transient parking, strictly, means drive-up parkers paying hourly or daily with no agreement in place. Monthly or contract parking is the recurring side, the 22 people at $95. Loose usage lumps event parking and validated parking in with transient even though those get billed to a venue or a neighboring business, so ask which of those three buckets the transient number actually is.

On the 80% margin claim: lots do have expenses, they're just small and lumpy. Property taxes, card processing on every ticket, sweeping and trash, snow removal if you're in that climate, restriping, sealcoating on a multi-year cycle, lighting and the power for it, liability insurance. In many states the assessor resets value on a sale, so the seller's tax line may not be your tax line, and that's a question for your county assessor.

Ask for twelve months of bank deposits and the pay station or app reports by month rather than the pro forma.

brandonlee36 · Answer

The transient line is where the real analysis needs to happen. Card processing on small tickets is brutal in a way the margin math never shows. If a typical drive-up ticket is $4 and the processor takes 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, that's about 10 percent of the ticket gone before anything else. Add a pay station vendor's per-transaction fee and it's closer to 13. On monthlies at $95, the same fee structure is noise. So a lot that's mostly transient and a lot that's mostly contract look nothing alike at the NOI line even with identical gross.

priya_n21 · Answer

Are those 22 monthlies on month-to-month agreements? If the hospital opens its own deck, that's half the stable income walking off.

karen_whitfield · Answer

Marlow's question is the one I'd want answered in writing, and I'd add a second one. What's the zoning on those 50 spaces, and what would the parcel support if parking demand there thinned out in fifteen years? A hospital-adjacent lot is usually sitting on land somebody eventually wants for a medical office building. If the answer is "nothing, it's a parking overlay," then the 85% is the whole story and there's no floor under it.

When a listing says 85 percent occupancy but the parker count implies half that, ask the broker to define the term

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