The Next Competitive Advantage: How Smart Mobility and Advanced Parking Technology Are Reshaping Real Estate Performance

Shareena Sandbrook Chief Commercial Development Officer, Towne

Throughout my career in parking technology, one conviction has shaped everything I have worked on: the experience of finding and accessing a space should be as effortless as anything else in a well-run building. That sounds simple. What I have learned, across more than 15 years designing and deploying integrated parking and mobility systems, is that achieving it requires technology, data, and operational discipline working together in ways most parking operations have not yet reached.

Over the past decade, property technology has fundamentally changed how buildings are owned, operated, and valued. Building managers work from unified dashboards. Maintenance is flagged before it becomes a failure. Tenant communications and service requests flow through integrated platforms. For occupants, the experience inside the building is increasingly seamless. For owners, the efficiency gains are measurable and real.

What has not kept pace is the technology layer managing the parking and mobility operation itself. For most assets, parking still runs on disconnected systems: a guidance vendor, a payment provider, an access control company, an enforcement solution, each operating in its own silo with its own data. The result is an operation that cannot respond dynamically to demand, cannot give owners a consolidated view of performance, and cannot generate the kind of continuous intelligence that drives better decisions and outcomes.

This is the gap Towne has been closing, and the owners who are working with us are capturing a real competitive advantage.

The Full Value of a Connected Parking and Mobility Operation

The arrival-through-departure experience encompasses every touchpoint from the moment someone decides where they are going to a specific location to the moment they leave the property: identifying and reserving parking before leaving home, navigating to the destination, guided entry, access, wayfinding to the front door, and eventual departure. When that full ecosystem is well-designed and well-connected, it delivers value across both the operational and experience sides of the business.

For the people using the asset, it means a seamless experience from the very beginning of the journey. Finding available parking before they leave. Guided entry that gets them to a level and zone quickly. Dynamic floor-by-floor signage inside the structure showing real-time availability, with LED indicators directing drivers directly to an open space. Access without tickets, cash, or stopping at a gate. Mobile payment that works the way people prefer to pay. That quality of experience shapes how a guest, resident, shopper, or employee feels about the asset from the very first moment of contact, and it influences whether they return.

For owners and operators, a connected parking operation delivers something just as valuable: a fundamentally more efficient way to manage a critical part of the asset. Self-serve tenant parking programs, digital validation, and automated access control replace manual processes that once required significant staff time and oversight. And the data the operation generates continuously, real-time occupancy by zone and level, demand patterns by hour and season, utilization trends across the portfolio, gives owners the intelligence to make better decisions at every level, from daily rate management to long-term capital and capacity planning.

This is the value proptech delivers inside the building. A modern, integrated parking and mobility operation is capable of delivering all of it, and connecting it to the broader performance picture of the asset.

The Technology That Makes It Possible

I have spent a good part of my career designing, refining, and deploying parking and mobility technology across diverse locations such as local municipalities to major corporate campuses to some of the most recognizable retail destinations in the country. That experience is built into every aspect of our integrated solution Nexity by Towne. It is not a product designed by people who studied parking from the outside. It is infrastructure built by operators, engineers, and technologists who understood from the start what owners and their customers actually need.

Nexity is AI-powered, cloud-based technology infrastructure that helps assets run more efficiently, delivers a better experience for everyone who uses them, and generates the real-time intelligence owners need to make confident decisions. Guidance, access control, revenue optimization, mobile payment, validation, and enforcement operate from a single shared data layer.

That means the platform responds to conditions automatically: adjusting pricing as demand shifts, directing drivers to available spaces in real time through in-structure signage and LED guidance, enabling frictionless entry and exit through license plate recognition and mobile credentials, and surfacing operational alerts before issues reach the guest. It is built for straightforward deployment, is fully customizable, and is designed to reflect the brand of the asset it serves.

For owners managing multiple locations, Nexity replaces the complexity of managing multiple vendors with conflicting systems, separate contracts, multiple service agreements and no shared view of performance. One partner for installation, maintenance, and support across every aspect of the solution. One portfolio-level dashboard instead of a patchwork of disconnected tools. What that translates to in practice: higher parking revenue through dynamic pricing and optimized utilization, lower operating costs through automation and reduced manual overhead, smarter capital decisions grounded in real utilization data, and a tenant and guest experience that supports retention, dwell time, and the performance of every business inside the asset.

What This Looks Like in Practice

At a high-traffic coastal municipality, the challenge was complexity at scale: high demand, multiple locations, and visitor volume that ranged from quiet weekday traffic to the concentrated surge of a festival season. A fragmented, multi-vendor operation could not respond to those conditions with the speed or precision they required. Nexity was deployed as a community-wide mobility platform, unifying guidance, dynamic signage, mobile payment, and centralized management into a single system. For the first time, operators could adjust pricing dynamically during peak periods in response to actual demand, and manage the entire operation from one view rather than juggling disconnected vendor relationships. Results: a 286% increase in parking revenue since implementation, 50% year-over-year revenue growth, 95% parking utilization, a 17% increase in compliance, more than 600,000 mobile app downloads, and 70% mobile payment adoption.

At a major corporate campus, the situation looked like a capacity problem. Employees were consistently reporting difficulty finding spaces and leadership was preparing for a significant parking expansion. Before committing capital, the team deployed an integrated guidance and occupancy sensing solution to understand how the existing assets were actually being used. Utilization patterns by zone, day of week, and time of day revealed significant available capacity that had been invisible without that connected view. The issue was not a shortage of spaces. It was a distribution and guidance problem. The expansion was deferred in favor of technology that directed employees and visitors more effectively to what already existed, delivering a noticeably better arrival experience in the process. Results: $10 to $20 million in capital redirected to other priorities, a 50% improvement in guidance system accuracy, a 15% increase in peak utilization, and $1.25 million in annual productivity gains.

These two examples illustrate different dimensions of what integrated parking technology makes possible: revenue growth, capital confidence, operational efficiency, and a measurably better experience for everyone who uses the asset. The asset type does not determine the outcome. The decision to manage the parking and mobility operation with the same intention as everything else in the portfolio does.

The Competitive Advantage Is the Parking Operation

The work I have done across my career has been driven by a simple belief: parking technology should do more than open a gate. It should generate the data that makes operations smarter, the experience that makes guests want to return, and the intelligence that gives owners the confidence to make better decisions about their assets.

The arrival-through-departure experience is already contributing to asset value through the revenue it captures, the costs it reduces, the customers and tenants it brings back, and the rents it supports. A frictionless arrival increases dwell time and drives more spend with tenants.

Dynamic pricing captures revenue that static operations leave on the table. Automation reduces the overhead that drags on profitability. And real utilization data informs the capital decisions that determine how efficiently the asset grows.

Owners who invest in advanced, integrated parking technology are not adding a peripheral amenity. They are extending proptech discipline to one of the highest-frequency, highest-impact parts of the portfolio, and connecting it directly to every financial outcome that matters.

The question is not whether the parking and mobility operation is contributing to your asset performance. It already is. The question is whether it is contributing as much as it could. The technology exists to close that gap, and the owners who deploy it first are already compounding the advantage.

I would welcome the conversation. Partner with Towne to find out what your parking and mobility operation is capable of.

About the Author

Shareena Sandbrook is Chief Commercial Development Officer at Towne, where she is part of the team leading growth of Nexity by Towne, the company’s fully integrated parking and mobility technology platform. With more than 15 years of experience designing, building, and deploying advanced parking and mobility systems, Shareena brings deep technical expertise and a practitioner’s perspective to the challenges facing real estate owners and operators today. Prior to joining Towne, she co-founded and served as CEO of Frogparking, building one of the most recognized integrated parking technology companies in the industry before its acquisition by Towne.