Parkable Director Toby Littin understands the horror of trying to find a decent park in New Zealand’s major cities. It is, pun acknowledged, what drives him.
“Parking is a little bit broken. We’ve all driven around the city looking for a park, past empty spaces, then you finally find an expensive parking building, it’s a drama to go and pay and often very expensive. Sometimes you come back, and it’s a nasty surprise you’ve been towed, ticketed, all kinds of problems.
“We’re living in a shared and connected world – people who share win. We’ve seen what Uber can do, we’ve seen Air B n’ B – there are 17 businesses valued at over a billion dollars in the sharing economy,” Toby said.
Parkable’s vision is making parking easy – connecting people who are looking for parks, with people who have spare space.
The dawn of automated cars doesn’t phase the company either.
“As we move into a world of connected cars, it’s the same scenario, we’re connecting the vehicle to the real estate and making it seamless to the parker. On the host side there’s a benefit that they’re getting yield from real estate that was previously vacant at times that suit them.
“We see ourselves as a pioneer in the sharing economy here in New Zealand. There’s a Presbyterian church in Auckland that has patchy availability during the week that they had no idea how to make money from. We’ve been able to deliver these guys tens of thousands of dollars in revenue enabling them to secure funds to repair their church,” Toby added.
The Parkable platform is dynamic, allowing hosts to take the space on and off the platform in real time so if you decide you need your driveway suddenly you can claim it back.
The future they believe is in further developing IoT (Internet of Things) connectivity with sensors – with the help of accelerator programme Vodafone xone.
“We believe we could learn a lot from Vodafone – we want to know more about what’s going on in our carparks in real time. It’s by having everything connected that we know that we will take Parkable to the next level,” Toby said.
