459 King Street &
9 Radcliffe Street
459 King Street is a 17 space gravel parking lot at the corner of King Street & Radcliffe Street. 9 Radcliffe Street is a 37 space paved parking lot adjacent to that property. Both parking lots are situated in the heart of the King Street Commercial District. Outside of tenant business hours, Palmetto Parking offers parking for the many nearby shops and businesses surrounding the properties.
Palmetto Parking has considerable knowledge of the Charleston parking market. We were able to use that knowledge to put together appropriate rate structures for the area.
Unexpected lulls and surges in demand for the properties left us feeling there was room to further maximize revenue. We felt the best answer to that problem was to combine our proven knowledge of the market with a new pricing model: our AI-Driven Dynamic Pricing.
Rather than basing pricing solely on what other properties are charging for parking or adjusting pricing when historical trends say a property or area will be busier, our dynamic pricing allows us to adjust prices in real-time for market conditions in Charleston as they are happening.
With our AI-driven dynamic pricing model, the price the customer pays is primarily determined by parking demand at that moment. As customers purchase parking at a property, our dynamic pricing algorithm begins adjusting the price upwards and continues until either the parking lot is full, or demand begins to fall.
The Result
After implementing these changes, we increased our client’s revenue by 17% within the first month of utilizing our dynamic pricing models.
Museum
Property
This property is one of South Carolina’s premier tourist destinations, featuring a nationally recognized museum, a highly sought after event space, auxiliary parking for a USL professional soccer team, and a departure point for several boat tour companies.
This property’s parking needs are serviced by a 263 space paved parking lot, a 348 space parking lot, and a grass parking area that can accommodate an additional 86 vehicles. The museum property managers attempted to manage their own parking over the years, which presented numerous challenges. Many of the museum’s visitors are elderly so having a parking attendant provided peace of mind to the museum staff and visitors. However, parking revenue was only collected from 10am-3pm daily and only on days when they had staff available. This meant no parking revenue was being collected for the last two hours the museum was open, any of the dinner cruise attendees, any special events at the property held outside of the hours of 10am-3pm, or any days the museum could not source staffing for the parking areas. In addition, many visitors were utilizing an unmanned auxiliary entrance to avoid paying for parking, leading to revenue leakage. The property’s parking rate had remained at $5 per day since 2011.
Our goal was to craft numerous solutions to bring the museum property into the 21st century while still providing top-notch customers service. We put in place an hourly rate structure for parking that was more in line with market rates but still affordable for visitors. Additionally, we implemented text-to-pay and QR Code payment platforms for the property to ensure revenue is captured 24/7. To assist less technologically savvy museum customers, Palmetto Parking retained some staffing to serve during peak hours and explain how the payment systems worked to those users.
Palmetto Parking took a two-prong approach to address the revenue leakage issues. We modified the traffic pattern to direct all parkers to enter through the auxiliary entrance and blocked the former main entrance. This change smoothed the way for future development plans for the property and allowed us to implement a camera-based enforcement system for the parking lots.
The Result
Within only the first 6 months of bringing Palmetto Parking’s management expertise on board, we had collected 29.1% more parking revenue than the property’s in-house parking operation brought in for the entirety of the previous year.
