How Our HOA Digitized Parking and Solved a 10-Year Problem in 3 Months

Executive Summary

In Q1 2025 I designed and implemented an initiative to digitize our HOA's parking permit system, in order to stop fraudulent physical permits and equitably distribute parking spots. With unanimous HOA board approval, we contracted with Parking Boss software, switched to SGT for parking enforcement, updated our Parking Rules, and placed new signage in the parking lots. Over 3 months into our new system, we have solved all of our original problems.

The purpose of this document is to share learnings on how we designed our new parking system, so that other HOAs and commercial properties can apply learnings to solve their own parking problems.

Context

The Montage Circle HOA in East Palo Alto, CA consists of 51 4-bedroom single family homes (Fig 1). In addition to the 2 parking spots in the garage of each home, the HOA also has 54 surface level parking spots intended for use by guests and/or residents: 52 regular spots and 2 handicap spots. Per our CC&Rs, each home may park 1 vehicle at any given time in the common area. While the spot is intended for use by guests, it can also be used by residents, as long as each address only uses at max 1 parking spot at any given time.

Given that 80% of the homes are rented out - and given that a majority of those homes are rented to 4 individuals who each have a car - you can see how there could be more demand for the common area spots than supply of spots. If this public good is unmanaged, everyone would want to park in the common area spots and use their own garage for other uses such as storage space or home gyms.

Problems

Ever since inception, our HOA in East Palo Alto, CA has had many parking problems. At a high level, the main problems are around fraudulent physical hangtags and lack of visibility for the HOA board into parking data.

1. Our parking lot was completely full at night - even though there are more parking spots than valid permits - and residents were complaining about not being able to find a parking spot.
2. Around 30% of the physical permit hangtags used at any given time were fake, and our enforcement company was not checking the hangtag numbers. At one point, there were 3 hangtags with the same number being used at the same time. Many hangtags were passed down from previous tenants who had ordered hundreds of fake hangtags from the same place that our HOA ordered permits from.
3. Around 10% of the physical permit hangtags were numbers that had been reported as "lost."
4. Our HOA management company had lost track of the valid parking permit numbers due to staff turnover and the error-prone nature of manual entry.
5. Our HOA board could not audit the parking enforcement company to see if they were doing their job because the board did not have access to the database of violation count by license plate. When we performed an audit, we discovered 1 vehicle which had been cited 18 times and had never been towed! It turns out that the previous enforcement company also could not determine if a car had been cited twice already to be towed on the third time, unless they radioed in to somebody sitting at a computer in the office...at 2am.

Previous Solution Attempts

Previous HOA boards had tried different solutions, with little success.

1. Our HOA management company had switched out all of the parking permit hangtags twice by reissuing new shapes of tags. The new ones were quickly duplicated mainly by residents ordering the hangtags from the same websites, so the original problem was not solved.
2. One proposed solution was to assign a parking spot per home. A problem with this approach is that assigning a spot would give each homeowner a false sense that the parking spot belong to them, when they are actually common area shared spots. Moreover, the enforcement burden would fall on each individual homeowner who would need to call in for tows, and we were worried about potential conflicts that could break out between residents. Lastly, making this change required amending the CC&Rs; we put it to a vote and there was not enough voter participation to meet 50%.
3. Another proposed solution was to just have an HOA board member call the tow company whenever vehicles were parked in the common area without parking permits. This was tried once, and it ended poorly because our 2-warnings-then-a-tow policy were not followed. Our HOA ended up having to reimburse the fees for the tows. With our previous parking enforcement system, board members could not easily determine how many warnings each vehicle had received.

Solution Implementation

Timeline

Parking Boss Software

Drivers must self-register their car's license plate for a digital parking permit at this Parking Boss URL: https://montage.parkingattendant.com/montage/services. Each home is provided 1 unique passcode, and the Parking Boss system enforces that each home can only have 1 valid permit at a time, regardless if a resident or guest is parking.

Drivers can register for up to 365 days. This allows for residents who park the same car in the common area to not have to re-register frequently.

Guests who visit can be registered in one of three ways: they can self-register with the passcode if the resident is willing to share it with them; the resident can register their license plate for them; or the resident can share a unique url for the guest to register without exposing the passcode. Alternatively, the guest can always park in free on-street parking or they can park in the resident's garage if the resident makes space for their car.

Enforcement

Our previous parking enforcement company Bastion Security Services was not willing to use Parking Boss. They never gave a strong reason as to why; given that they had not provided the level of service of our contract and had only enforced on half the days that they had agreed to, I suspect that Bastion didn't like the idea of the HOA board having more data transparency.

We found another enforcement company SGT which Parking Boss had recommended. SGT really likes Parking Boss because the LPR software makes it faster for officers to check. They just scan each license plate and can check cars efficiently. In our experience, we've noticed they check around our entire lot of ~30 cars in 12 minutes. We signed a contract for SGT to visit the site every evening at a random time to check if the car in the common area parking spots were registered.

There is a lot less room for fraudulent tags now because the check is binary: either someone's license plate is registered or is not. Before, Bastion would drive around, shining a flash light through each car's foggy window to see if there was something that resembled a parking permit hangtag. They never checked if the hangtag was legitimate; it could have been some other random hangtag or could have been a fake one.

Whenever there is a violation, SGT uses the Parking Boss smart warning sticker (Fig 3). It is a lot more efficient than filling out a physical form because the parking violation details are documented once in the Parking Boss software, with no need for carbon copy paper or manual entry in a back records office. The officer scans the QR code on the smart warning sticker, places it on the car, and takes a photo for evidence in Parking Boss that the warning slip has been placed. The driver of the car can scan the QR code or visit the website directly to see details.

Costs

Our system runs at a cost of just under $10k per year. Divided by 51 homes, that is $16.34 per home per month.

Recurring costs:

• Parking Boss software: $1872 per year (price stays fixed forever)
• SGT enforcement: $7920 per year
• Smart warning stickers: ~$200 per year

One-time costs:

• Ordering of 13 signs (several were included for free): ~$500
• Installation of 13 signs on 12 existing poles and 1 new sign pole: ~$800

Communication to Residents

As a result of our communication push, most residents were registered in Parking Boss within 1.5 weeks.

We communicated to residents through mail, email, posted paper and digital notices of proposed parking rules, posted paper and digital notices of board and special meeting agendas, physical papers on cars, and physical papers at doors with Parking Boss magnet.

Our HOA manager's email was listed on the posted parking rules: physically posted on the community bulletin board and digitally posted on the Parking Boss website when self-registering.

I also communicated frequently to board members to keep them in the loop, as they had authorized me to act on behalf of the board in implementing the new parking system.

Before/After Comparison

Metrics

As shown in Table 1, all of the cars are being checked on a consistent basis now. I expect the number of tows and citations to decrease as people / visitors realize that enforcement is real and not a joke.

Table 1. Before/after comparison of metrics.

Other Benefits

Our HOA manager has also been very happy with Parking Boss at our HOA and in other HOAs they manage because they have less responsibility over issuing parking hangtags. Before, our HOA management company had multiple people managing the process in a manual way with an Excel spreadsheet and hangtags placed in piles in their office. It became even trickier with the onset of remote work when the HOA manager needed to ping someone in the office to check for hangtag numbers and to mail out new hangtags.

I have really appreciated the Parking Boss web app dashboard (Fig 4) which show us how many vehicles were checked and even have a heat map of where cars were checked. For the first time, we know that our enforcement company is doing their job and that they are checking the entire lot equally, without favoring any areas.

Resident Pushback

Surprisingly, we did not receive any public comments or resident pushback during implementation. We did receive 2 complaints from residents after rollout of the new system because they were upset about no long being able to park multiple cars. When we showed them the CC&Rs had not changed where each house can only park 1 car, the residents were understanding and they asked whether they could purchase another permit. Although we could not provide another permit, we suggested that they talk to their neighbors to see if they could rent their digital permit from them.

Concerns about Parking Occupancy Percentage

One slightly concerning metric is that our parking lot is not parking as many cars each evening as before, and on-street parking immediately adjacent to our neighborhood has become more full, though there are still some on-street parking spots a hundred feet south of our neighborhood. Critics could point to this as a failure of our policy: that we aren't filling up our off-street private parking spots when there is still a lot of demand for parking.

I am slightly concerned about the lower occupancy percentage, but I am optimistic for the long run because I have started noticing some behavior changes. For instance, I noticed that one of the homes which used their garage entirely for storage and not parking cars had for the first time started clearing out their garage to park a car. It is possible that our parking occupancy might be lower because we've now managed out non-residents who were parking here illegally to begin with. I don't have the metrics on this, but I would assume it's at least 1 or 2 cars, based on anecdotes I have heard of people parking and walking off site.

One way to increase the parking occupancy percentage is to encourage those residents who aren't using their digital permit to rent them out to other residents, so that they could make some money to offset HOA dues. Of the 51 homes, 7 of them have never used their Parking Boss digital permit. One of them was my neighbor, and I helped resolve the issue as it turned out that their landlord had forgotten to pass the code on to them. Another resident just doesn't have the need to park that many cars.

Recommendations for Other Parking Lots

I am very interested in scaling this up to more private lots such as HOA private parking lots and commercial retail strip mall parking lots. These are the recommendations I would make.

1. Talk to previous HOA board members. I was able to brainstorm with 2 previous HOA board members who had unsuccessfully tried to solve the parking problem. They provided me with historical context that I was not aware of, such as the fact that a former resident had ordered 100 fraudulent parking permits.
2. Work with your HOA manager. They are a collaborator and can also stand to benefit from a more streamlined parking system. Our manager helped guide me through the process for special meetings to adopt parking rules, 28-day review periods of parking rules changes, and more.
3. Talk to residents to learn about their parking experience. And don't judge. I spoke with a resident who complained about difficulty finding parking; a few days later when I walked past their garage I noticed the garage was not being used to park cars. It helped give me some context, as I quickly noticed that most homes were not parking cars in both of their garage parking spots.
4. Document the system so that future board members can see the thought process. I had set up a Google Drive to share HOA documents with the board and residents, and I included a design doc on the digital parking permit project.
5. Feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to share learnings in more detail and to give a demo run through our Parking Boss platform.

Conclusion

From an equity and fairness lens, enforcing 1 permit per home is the right thing to do. With our previous approach, we were effectively favoring people who arrived home earlier and then the people coming home late would be out of parking spots. Only when the public good (private parking) is managed will people change their internal optimization curves and incentive structures, so that they park a car first in their garage before parking in the parking lot.

From a higher level perspective, managing parking efficiently is a prerequisite to building more housing, stores, and restaurants. Our HOA is more than just a 54-spot parking lot; it's a neighborhood of ~200 residents and 102 garage parking spots. By managing the parking lot, we've now incentivized residents to park in their garages, to consider sharing a car, maybe even taking transit more. If we kept parking inefficiently managed, it would be sending a signal to residents that they should turn their garages into storage or home gyms, park multiple cars in the neighborhood, and buy their own car rather than take transit.

Now that our HOA manages our off-street parking supply, we should continue encouraging our city to manage its on-street parking. Just as non-residents had parked in our HOA, many non-EPA residents also park on EPA streets. I wrote a post on my East Palo Alto Sun blog here:

I have learned from this experience that we can change human behavior softly through nudging. Here we nudged residents to use their garage parking by managing the shared parking; I never forced them to park in their garage. After thinking through our HOA's parking in detail, I have begun to think about how much parking management it takes to create a successful downtown with vibrant retail and restaurants, or even just a successful strip mall where people can find parking and spend their money. Just as our HOA had problems where the parking lot was entirely full, I have noticed a number of strip malls (e.g. Molly Tea in Sunnyvale, the strip mall across the street from it that has now absorbed overflow parking from Molly Tea, Chicha San Chen in Bellevue, WA, Chase Bank in San Antonio Village, Mountain View) where parking is entirely full. These stores are literally losing customers who turn away because they can't find parking. I look forward to applying learnings from this HOA experience to help solve these problems in commercial parking lots.