Parking madness and the race for visitor spaces

Every so often we conduct semi-serious polls on the Flat Chat website; they’re far from scientific but they do offer some insight into the collective strata mindset.

Recently, we asked Flatchatters to name the misbehaviours of their neighbours that irritated them the most.

Smoke drift from balcony puffers was number one, understandably, but second and fifth – bookending barking dogs and neighbours talking loudly on their balconies late at night – were complaints about parking.

Prime among them was residents using visitor parking as permanent extra parking for their own cars.  Less common but presumably much more annoying was rogue parkers selfishly occupying other owners’ established spots, and you can add to that owners parking on spare areas of common property driveways.

Car spaces are in short supply in most unit blocks – and it doesn’t help when residents take visitor parking for themselves. Why do they do it?

Designated visitor parking is common property and some residents think that, since they partly own the spot and visitors clearly don’t, owners take priority.

A friend told me that she once got her mother to park in a visitor spot opposite a tradie’s garage which he used as a workshop and for storage.  When they returned, they found the must luridly obscene and threatening note on Mum’s windscreen, the gist of it being to never dare park on “his” parking spot again.

Another problem is the definition of what constitutes a visitor.  Is it someone who drops in for an hour for a cup of tea, or is it the romantic partner of a resident who arrives on a Friday night, parks up, and leaves on a Monday morning?

Are the family or friends who bring four cars to an airbnb holiday apartment that has only two attached car spots “visitors”? 

How about a resident who parks for 15 minutes while they unload their shopping?  Or half a dozen tradies working on a renovation who are there all day and every day until it’s finished?  They’re not residents, so what are they?

One block discovered its visitor parking had been rented to workers from a building site next door.  When they changed the coding on the electronic “beepers”, meaning non-residents could no longer access the carpark, a riot almost ensued.

It turned out an enterprising tenant – yes, a renter – had bought a stack of beepers from an electronics shop, matched the code with her own device and was renting them to the workers for a tidy sum.

When the con game was discovered, she did a midnight flit out of her flat, leaving a bunch of out-of-pocket workers, one of whom threatened to sue the strata committee – a threat that was as empty as the now freed-up parking spots.

Parking spots are valuable real estate. Ask any local real estate agent what difference a parking space makes to the sales price of a property, and for an estimate of the rent on a space.

That’s how much rogue parkers are stealing from the rest of the owners, not to mention the inconvenience their selfish land-grabs cause.

Most strata committees and residents ignore rules on visitor parking until it becomes an issue, and then it’s already a major source of dispute.

Unless you have a by-law that establishes rules, all sorts of people will assume they are entitled to use visitor parking as and when they like.

So a smart strata scheme will canvass its owners and tenants about what restrictions they think would be fair and reasonable, including durations of stays during the day and overnight, then create a by-law accordingly.

The problem then becomes how you enforce it – and that’s an issue we can park for another time.

This column first appeared on the Australian Financial Review online.