Someone told me this week that parking lots are the only commercial asset where you can underwrite the deal without ever talking to a tenant.

The line about no building meaning simpler diligence is exactly the trap. I almost bought a 28-space lot in Akron where the "monthly contracts" turned out to be the seller texting Venmo requests to people he knew personally. Walked away from that one but only after spending $1,800 on an attorney reviewing documents that didn't really exist in any enforceable form.

What actually saved me was asking for 90 days of processor deposits, not the seller's summary, the raw deposit history from whatever system hit the bank. Cash-collected lots will show you gaps, weird round numbers, or nothing at all because there is nothing to show. If a seller can't produce that in 48 hours, the occupancy number is a story, not a fact.

What payment method is the seller claiming they use to collect those 30 contracts?

Confirm the collection method first, then pull the reconciliation trail behind it.

What app or kiosk vendor did they use, because that data does not lie.

Sold a small surface lot in Grand Prairie in 2019 and I was on the seller side, which means I know exactly how easy it is to make occupancy look cleaner than it is. My "30 monthly contracts" was actually 18 real ones, eight guys who paid whenever they felt like it, and four spots I counted because a landscaping crew parked there three days a week while they did a job nearby. Nobody asked me to produce a single invoice. The buyer used my number, closed, and I imagine found out the hard way sometime in month two.

The thing I'd push back on in the original post is the part about kiosk or app data being a better trail. It is, but only if you get the actual export from the vendor, not a screenshot the seller pulls and hands you. I've seen those screenshots cropped. Ask them to add you as a read-only user on whatever platform they use, ParkWhiz, Honk, SpotHero, whatever it is, so you can see the transaction history yourself rather than a summary they assembled. If they balk at that, you have your answer without needing to run another number.

What's the term length on those 30 contracts, because month-to-month and a 12-month agreement are two completely different assets dressed in the same clothes?

The one thing I have never seen work: asking the seller for a rent roll equivalent and trusting whatever they hand you.

What actually happens is you get a spreadsheet the manager built in Excel the week before listing, columns perfectly formatted, and then you pull 90 days of merchant processing statements and three of those "monthly" accounts are one-time transactions that never repeated. @op what municipality is this lot in, because some cities require parking operators to file occupancy reports with the zoning board and that document exists independently of anything the seller touches.

The cash collection problem is worse than most people admit because a seller who ran a lot on envelopes in a lockbox for six years has no meaningful trail to hand you, and the number they give you is whatever they remember feeling good about. I bought a note secured against a small commercial parcel in 2022 and the borrower's "income documentation" was a spiral notebook. That notebook was the entire paper trail.

What does the monthly variance look like over the last 24 months? A stable lot should be boring, same 28 or 30 contracts, minor churn. If the numbers are suspiciously flat that is actually the red flag, because real operations have noise.

Garfield Heights duplex hunter here so I have zero parking lot reps, but the deposit schedule point hit me.

What stops a seller from backdating thirty monthly agreements the week you sign the LOI?

Cross-reference the seller's reported gross receipts against their Schedule C or entity return for the same period.

Monthly contracts on a surface lot win when the paper trail is airtight; transient revenue wins when you need to verify nothing because the kiosk owns the ledger.

The question nobody in this thread has asked yet concerns termination rights on those 30 monthly contracts, assuming they are even written down. Month-to-month is not the same risk as a 12-month agreement with a 30-day notice clause, and both are radically different from a corporate account where a facilities manager signed on behalf of 15 employees and can cancel with one email the week after closing. When you get the contracts, the first column I would build is not rate, it is who has the unilateral right to leave and on what notice, because a 95 percent occupied lot where 60 percent of revenue sits in two corporate accounts is a concentration risk that the average occupancy number completely hides.

The checklist I would run: pull the actual payment records from whatever processor or invoicing system the operator used, not a summary the seller prepared; match deposit dates against the schedule for at least six months; ask for the full contract list with named counterparties, not an anonymized count; call two or three of the corporate accounts cold and ask whether they plan to stay if rates change; and check whether any of the contracts include rate caps or grandfather clauses that would prevent you from repricing after acquisition.

What is the split between individual monthly parkers and any kind of account or corporate arrangement on those 30 contracts?

The part that got me was "the parker will drop the day the lot sells and rates move" because that is the whole story and most people underwriting these things are not pricing that churn risk at all. On the 40-lot park I was looking at in rural Ohio the operator gave me an occupancy figure with the same confidence as a signed lease, and when I pushed on it the paper behind it was basically a spreadsheet he made himself. Monthly contracts on a surface lot are closer to a gym membership than a lease, and the moment a competitor opens two blocks away or the employer anchoring that demand shrinks, you find out what your real rent roll is.

What I would want to know before I took any of this seriously is who is actually on the other side of those 30 contracts. If it is 30 individual commuters that is one risk profile, but if eight of those spots are reserved for one company's employees and that company is mid-size and lease-flexible, your stable income just became a single-tenant concentration problem inside an asset class that was supposed to be simple.

Thirty monthly contracts with no kiosk, no app, and invoiced by the seller personally is just a number someone typed.

What I see in my actual book is that unverified occupancy collapses the moment ownership transfers, usually inside 60 days.

The premise that parking is simpler to underwrite is backwards, and I think people arrive at that belief because the asset looks naked compared to a building, so they assume the numbers must be cleaner. They are not. I have never touched a parking lot but I have done enough note work on commercial paper to know that the moment a seller's income stream is mostly informal, the gap between what they report and what actually hit a bank account can be thirty percent or more, and nobody is lying exactly, they are just telling you the best month annualized. The specific question I would want answered before anything else is not how many contracts exist but whether any single parker represents more than ten or fifteen percent of the monthly gross, because a 40-space lot where six corporate accounts are carrying the whole revenue story is not diversified income, it is six tenants with no lease and no building keeping them there.

What I do on the development side when I am trying to validate income that does not come with a clean document trail is work backwards from expenses. Property tax records are public. If the seller is paying taxes on a lot assessed at a value that implies a certain income, and their deposit schedule is showing you something dramatically higher, one of those numbers is wrong and it is usually the deposit schedule. Same logic on insurance, because a lot generating real monthly volume gets insured differently than one that is half-empty most of the year. Neither of those documents requires the seller's cooperation to obtain. Are you anywhere close to getting the actual tax and insurance history on this one, or are you still at the deposit-schedule stage?

The premise that parking income is harder to verify than multifamily is right, but the reason I'd add is that even clean app-based collection data is only as good as the rate structure behind it. I've seen kiosk exports from SpotHero or ParkWhiz that show consistent monthly deposits and still buried a 40 percent promotional discount the seller ran for six months to inflate occupancy numbers heading into a sale. What were those 30 monthly contracts actually priced at twelve months ago versus today?