We recently wrote about a handy mail service that everyone needs to know about, and now we’re shining a spotlight on a genius little app that single-handedly solves parking headaches at San Francisco condos. Because let’s be real — as long as condos have been around, so have their parking issues. Enter Parkade.

Smart. Simple.

Parkade is bringing parking nirvana to condos across San Francisco. And it makes sense. The app makes it easy for condos to easily share parking, eliminating the old-school ways many condo residents use to share parking today — bulletin boards, texts, email lists — and ushering them into the 21st century. 

So How’s It Work?

Take pretty much any urban condo, and parking is an issue. Even luxury buildings have a tough time doing parking right — often offering some combo of valet, deeded parking or stackers to try to give residents the best balance of construction costs, parking reliability and parking convenience. Unfortunately, despite these best efforts, parking at many of San Francisco’s larger condos is still a drag. Worse, it can be outright difficult, especially for a resident or guest who’s just looking for a short-term parking spot. When a resident does get a deeded spot, it often sits empty, sometimes for months, because it can be hard to share parking in condos.

Parkade solves all of this, and La Galleria, a 187-unit building in San Francisco’s Lower Nob Hill neighborhood is a shining example.

Before Parkade, La Galleria did a few things to try to improve the parking experience for residents:

• All residents had deeded parking spots.
• The building rented 10 to 12 parking spots from residents for $200/mo, and then rented them back out short-term as visitor parking at $2.50/hr. Spots couldn’t be reserved in advance and space would often run out, and the accounting cost to bill owners was significant. 
• Property management maintained a waitlist of people who are searching for long-term parking, and would manually match them up with owners who were willing to rent out their spot. 

Late last year, La Galleria made the very savvy switch to Parkade. Now, dozens of residents have opted to make their parking available to fellow residents via Parkade’s app. Short-term parking is now available 24/7, in advance, with prices usually between $.50-1.00/hr. In other words, Parkade works like a dream for visitor parking.

Residents who need extra long-term parking book a spot using Parkade’s monthly parking feature, with no need for property management to serve as the middle man. Parking has quickly moved from a point of frustration to a point of pride for the building. Potential buyers no longer have to accept that it’ll be really hard to have guests visit or keep an extra car. All in all, it’s been a roaring success, and you can get the full details of La Galleria Condos’ experience with Parkade here.

The Takeaway

La Galleria has solved parking. So has Glassworks, another SF condo, and 200 Brannan, all thanks to a simple app. If you’re hoping to live in a San Francisco condo, I can make that happen. If you’re despairing over the parking situation in your San Francisco condo, definitely check out this app.