How to charge for guest parking at your apartment building
A practical guide to setting nightly, daily, and overflow rates for visitor parking — without losing your residents.
Most multifamily property managers wildly under-monetize guest parking, then complain that overnight guests are eating their resident stalls. The mistake is treating it like an enforcement problem instead of a pricing problem. If a guest pass is free, every guest will stay overnight; if it's $40, your residents will host elsewhere. Neither extreme works. The sweet spot — and the part most owners get wrong — is *time-of-day* pricing.
The baseline pattern that works for 80% of properties:
- Free guest passes during off-peak (10am–4pm), when stalls are empty anyway. This keeps your residents happy and stops them from gaming visitor codes.
- $5–$10 evenings (5pm–10pm), when residents are getting home and your overflow is tight. This nudges guests to leave at a reasonable hour without making it feel punitive.
- $15–$25 overnight (10pm–8am), priced to actually clear demand. If you're full every weekend, you're underpriced.
Why this works: residents see "free during the day" and don't perceive it as a cost. The overnight rate signals scarcity and pushes guests to commute or rideshare. Your enforcement officer doesn't have to argue with anyone — the price did the work.
The mistake to avoid: flat-rate pricing. A $10/day flat rate either leaves money on the table (the 6pm–11pm guest pays the same as the 24-hour guest) or pisses off your residents (the 2pm coffee-meeting guest gets dinged). Time-of-day pricing fixes both.
How to operationalize it in ParkDwell:
- Open the property's rule set editor.
- Add a "Guest" rule with these tiers:
- - 10am–4pm: $0
- - 4pm–10pm: $5/hr (capped at $10)
- - 10pm–8am: $15 flat overnight
- Set a daily cap per resident — 2–3 passes/week works for most properties.
- Enable auto-extension at the overnight rate when a daytime pass overruns.
The first month, you'll see your guest-pass volume drop by ~30%. That's not bad news — those were the freeloaders. Your revenue will climb 4–6×, your resident complaints will drop, and your patrol officers will spend their time on real enforcement work instead of haggling over visitor codes.