Kylie Davis: (00:01)

Welcome to the Proptech Podcast. It's Kylie Davis here, and I'm delighted to be your host as we explore the brave new world where technology and real estate collide. I passionately believe we need to create and grow a sense of community between the innovators and real estate agents and property owners, and sharing our stories is a great way to do that. Now the aim of each episode is to introduce listeners to a Proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and to explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech and how they can create amazing property experiences. And my guest in this episode is Mosstyn Howell, founder of UbiPark, a digital parking platform that makes it easy for us to travel smarter.

Kylie Davis: (00:45)

Now you may be wondering what has parking got to do with real estate? But did you know that 30% of urban traffic congestion is actually caused by people looking for parking? And in cities like London and Paris, a typical driver loses 165 hours a year being caught in traffic. So UbiPark helps building owners manage the parking experience with a white label app that both improves how tenants can use their parking spaces and speeds up entering and exiting parking without the need to fall out the window as I have been known to do, to grab one of those annoying tickets. So here to tell us all about how parking is actually a very sexy issue that as building owners and managers we in real estate should really care about, Mosstyn, welcome to the Proptech Podcast.

Mosstyn Howell: (01:37)

Thanks for having me, Kylie.

Kylie Davis: (01:39)

It's great to have you on the show. So I am fascinated by this idea that something like UbiPark is a Proptech. So I want to hear your elevator pitch.

Mosstyn Howell: (01:51)

Very good. Well UbiPark's digitalized the entire parking transaction in allowing the motorist to search, navigate, access and pay from their smartphone. And soon to be in the dash of the car with the deal we've just done with Porsche. So from a Proptech point of view, we're solving problems for the tenant as well as the property owner. So with the property owner, it's solving solutions around efficiencies and automation and providing better customer experience back to the tenant. And with the tenant, we're doing a lot of different things for them at the moment, where they've obviously got a contactless parking product, which is meeting all the COVID-19 safety requirements. And we fit into these return to work plans by allowing flexibility and automatically allowing staff to share parking spaces as they return to work.

Kylie Davis: (02:40)

Because in the commercial space, the access to transport and being able to park your car or being able to get to the office or get to where you want to go, that can be a big decider in how people are choosing the property that they're going to let.

Mosstyn Howell: (02:57)

Yeah, I think it's a big decision, and parking's obviously your first and your last impression. So probably the main customers of the building being probably the CEO of the tenant. So those first impressions and last impressions are super important, but we're also looking at from an entire mobility point of view. So how can we help get people in and out of buildings as efficiently and quickly as possible?

Kylie Davis: (03:25)

Yeah, that's true, isn't it? You think about all these absolutely gorgeous big commercial buildings that are in some of our cities and then the shitty parking stations that are at the bottom of them, that idea that the first and last impression that you have is of the parking station. How does UbiPark fix that?

Mosstyn Howell: (03:45)

Yeah, I think the first thing I do in my presentations is I show a great photo of a wonderful foyer. I use the one at 367 Collins Street a fair bit, and then I'll show the photo of the car park. And obviously the first impression as you walk into that foyer is amazing. And getting out of the lifts and into visit someone in the office is a great experience, but it's not the same in the parking location. So, we're bringing it into the digital world. So, a lot of our solutions are ticket-based and pass card based, they're archaic, people are queuing up, things break down. So we've brought that all onto the smartphone, but we also ... and we're allowing people to do the entire transaction. So we call it snap, search, navigate, access and pay, directly from that smartphone. One thing there is if you've got existing technology, we can plug into that technology and just digitise it from there. So you don't have to spend a lot of money to retrofit the solution in.

Kylie Davis: (04:52)

Okay, awesome. So, let's talk about this very sexy issue of parking because I've seen you present before, I know you've got some great stuff to say about that. How big a problem is parking in dollar terms, or hours wasted, or impact on the environment? Help us get a handle on why this is such a big issue.

Mosstyn Howell: (05:24)

Yeah, so yeah, parking contributes to about 30% of our traffic congestion in our cities, which is obviously causing a lot of lost productivity. Places like Paris and London, people losing around 165 hours a year, being caught in traffic congestion-

Kylie Davis: (05:31)

Oh my God.

Mosstyn Howell: (05:33)

Even places like Singapore, which you find very efficient, they're losing around 40 hours per annum. So it's a really big impact to the congestion and getting around our cities. To the property owner I think there's a couple of different things. So the impact of revenue also impacts the value of the building. So there's been a real impact from COVID-19 with parking revenue aside, but obviously it's not just the revenue or the rent. It's also the valuation of the building, and having those assets working really well and getting the utilisation and the yield through your parking obviously then helps the valuation of the building as well.

Kylie Davis: (06:16)

Yeah. Okay. So I'm the owner of a big commercial building. My parking is an asset as part of that, because I'm getting both rent and I'm getting rent from it, basically. And I've got someone else to manage it for me, like a Wilson or Secure Parking or one of those other big companies. What's the impact of COVID ... so, and with everyone staying at home over the COVID period, what has the impact of that been on parking in major buildings around the country?

Mosstyn Howell: (06:54)

I would say massive, the impact to a property owner, the large property owners especially with CBD buildings and peak parking operations. A lot of our property owners will do a lease agreement with a Wilson or a Secure and pretty much the lease agreements, the large lease agreements have dived considerably. So someone like Dexus next year are coming up, they have a lease deal that they do every five years. Wilson and Secure fight normally very, very hard to win that business. If I was Darren Steinberg I'd be a little concerned around my lease agreements next year. And they are, the property owners that we're speaking to have obviously been through either renegotiations or some of the operators have completely walked away from locations. So there's a whole mindset change in the industry, in the property industry, on what the operator can do for them, but it's not the big rent number anymore.

Kylie Davis: (07:51)

Right. So, for a property owner, UbiPark's able to replace a Secure Parking or a Wilson, or a bigger organisation, or are they ... or do you work with them or do you work directly with the property managers of those businesses of those buildings?

Mosstyn Howell: (08:10)

It's probably all of the above, Kylie. So we're a technology platform that can work with the operator and help the operator be more efficient, especially in a managed parking situation they've agreement. We can provide all the data in a dashboard back to the property owner, that's coming automatically through all the different parking solutions. We can still streamline all the customer experience and provide the agile parking solutions we do to the tenants. And we can work out, where a Wilson or Secure might need to use a pass card reading from the building management system to get the monthly parkers in and out, they can use the UbiPark system exactly the same way.

Mosstyn Howell: (08:54)

But we're also seeing a real shift in the market to property owners looking at running their own operations and we can obviously help them do that. The first thing is obviously all the efficiencies and streamlining all the processes, taking away all the manual and paper-based processes, but allowing ... Our technology allows the tenants to manage their own parking around a set of business rules set by the property owner, allowing them to add and delete users, and allowing their staff to share parking spaces automatically under the set of business rules set by the property owner.

Kylie Davis: (09:31)

So give me an example of that. So I'm the CEO of the company and I'm off on holidays for two weeks. I can lend my account, my parking space to someone else, or?

Mosstyn Howell: (09:40)

Yeah. So there's a couple of different solutions for it, but the first one is the CEO's away. It might be for a couple of days and might be for a couple of weeks, they can put their space back into a pool and it can be private or public. So it could only be locked down to a certain user group. So it might be just some other senior staff who can use that space, or it could be open to all the staff, or it could be open to the public where you can create some revenue out of that space in a marketplace situation.

Kylie Davis: (10:07)

Okay.

Mosstyn Howell: (10:07)

It could also just be that staff are coming in three days a week, like one from this return to work. And then there's a space available for say Friday, for instance. And that can be used by someone that's coming in on Thursday, Friday. So we do it in two different ways. We do it where you can book a spot, which is the traditional way of doing it. But we also do it in a drive up situation. So we can show the spaces that are available to the staff, and they can see that as they're leaving home and take a space in the car park knowing that there's spaces available for them.

Kylie Davis: (10:45)

So you kind of pre-book it in advance and say, "Yep, I'll have that. I'm coming in on Wednesday. That's my spot. And that'll make it easy for me because I can pick up ... get home earlier and pick up the kids from daycare."

Mosstyn Howell: (10:56)

That's the first option. And it's the option that most people fall to because it's a secure way knowing you've got a space, but some of our smarter ... I wouldn't say ... smarter is probably a tougher word, but if some of our-

Kylie Davis: (11:09)

More advanced.

Mosstyn Howell: (11:09)

Yeah. More forward thinking or innovative-

Kylie Davis: (11:14)

Super users.

Mosstyn Howell: (11:16)

... corporates are looking at it, how the best way to get utilisation out of those spaces. So in some situations we're getting 150 staff through 30 spaces because they're using them in a drive up way where we don't have to save the space or we're not booking it for a day when it's only being used for two or three hours through that day. So we can come up with ... So one of our customers uses a mixture for instance, so you can book up to 20 spaces and then the other 50 spaces are what they call agile packing. And they're just used by first in first dressed.

Kylie Davis: (11:48)

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Kylie Davis: (12:33)

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Kylie Davis: (13:05)

So I just want to get really clear that ... make sure we've kind of outlined our value properly. If I am a building owner at the moment, I have parking space under my building. In current thinking the value of that is that I rent that out to someone like a parking company and they provide me with a revenue stream, but COVID's kind of broken that quite considerably. And my options in the future are I can still rent it out to a parking company, but they can use something like UbiPark to make it more ... a better experience for my tenants, or I can take on the management of the parking space myself and have a lot more flexibility around how I'm managing my parking. How am I going so far?

Mosstyn Howell: (13:53)

Yeah, that's pretty [inaudible 00:13:53]. It's probably two types of parking deals that the property owner does with, it's a straight out rent. And then obviously the operators pay that rent and then they go out and do the best to make as much revenue as they can.

Kylie Davis: (14:08)

Yeah.

Mosstyn Howell: (14:08)

Sometimes that misaligns with the building because a Wilson or Secure are there to create revenue for their company, which might be a little bit of a different agenda to what a Dexus or a Charter Hall for instance have around the actual property.

Kylie Davis: (14:23)

Well, you see that in hospitals, don't you? You see that where like you've got the ... people need to be there for a period of time, for a long period of time. And sometimes parking stations can be completely punitive around that crisis situation of needing to be at hospital for a long time.

Mosstyn Howell: (14:43)

Yes, there's not one hospital that rents out their ... or leases out their parking. It's each hospital, the rates and the presentation and everything is actually under a management agreement with the operator and it's totally in control.

Kylie Davis: (15:00)

So yeah, there's a disconnect between goals.

Mosstyn Howell: (15:05)

The operator gets a bit of a whack in the hospital sometimes because parking's expensive and the likes and charging the sick's obviously not a great PR exercise, but usually with PPP when someone like Peter Mac in Melbourne or a lot of the New South Wales and Queensland hospitals have had a PPP where parking revenue is actually a big way of getting the hospital built. So the billion dollar hospital building in Melbourne with BCCC and Peter Mac, it's funded out of parking revenue.

Kylie Davis: (15:43)

Right. Okay, look, I'm sorry. I got us diverted on hospitals, but let's go back to ... So as a building owner, I've got the ability to take it under my own control if I want to and give my tenants a better experience. And if I'm a tenant or a driver or a visitor to that building, my experience is that I can probably see the space that I'm going to be parking in, in advance and book it. And it's going to make my life easier in that I'm going to know where I'm going and I'm not going to have to have a ticket, lean over and pull them. I always fall out of the window because I'm short. So I'm not going to have that horrible ticket experience. And I'm not going to be standing behind seven people at the parking machine when I absolutely have to get out of there to pay my parking. Is that how it works?

Mosstyn Howell: (16:32)

Yeah. I think that the big thing's customer experience. So by having the digital solution, you're not lined up at a pay station as you said, seven or eight deep waiting for that to happen. You don't worry about tickets jamming and the machines going down. It's a lot more ... better experience for the user. I think in the COVID world, it's a windows up solution if using the app, so you don't have to wind your window down. So you're completely COVID safe which is driving a lot of our demand at the moment. There's a lot of operational efficiencies in there. So whether it's been used by the operator to run the car park, or it's been used by the property owner, we digitise the entire transaction. So things like monthly parking, people just apply online. They tick a terms and conditions, there's your contract done-

Kylie Davis: (17:25)

Oh wow.

Mosstyn Howell: (17:25)

And then they just download the app and they're ready to start. Whereas currently you do a contract, you to and fro, it's scanned and-

Kylie Davis: (17:36)

Send it as a PDF and make you print it out and take a photo of it with your phone and then send it back. It's such an efficient process. Not.

Mosstyn Howell: (17:40)

That's right. And you got to get the pass card-

Kylie Davis: (17:40)

My pet peeve.

Mosstyn Howell: (17:40)

... that you've programmed in. You've got to get the user into the accounting system for invoicing and things like that. So this just sort of makes that whole process making it completely automated.

Kylie Davis: (17:40)

Cool. So how big is UbiPark Mosstyn? How long have you been going for and what are some measurements around you guys?

Mosstyn Howell: (18:06)

Yeah, we're six years old now and we're a staff of 13 that's growing, that's growing a fair bit this year. I mean, the demand here in Australia has been great but we've also started to expand overseas. So we're seeing ... We've just made our first sales into New Zealand and the United States and looking at some great opportunities in South Africa, Philippines and the UK. So the business off the back of COVID has really been fast-tracked. We were already looking at trends like remote working prior to COVID, so we had solutions already set up and now they're becoming obviously at a higher demand.

Kylie Davis: (18:48)

Because remote and flexible working requires remote ... well, requires flexible parking.

Mosstyn Howell: (18:54)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, to me, it's been fast-tracked. We thought that people ... if we go back prior to COVID hitting, about 40% of the tenants spaces in the office car park were being wasted. So yeah, you can imagine there was still already some flexible working. So Mondays and Fridays were always reasonably quiet in the office. As we know probably Tuesday 11 o'clock is the busiest time in the office pre-COVID. So we know there was already a lot of space. A company like Telstra was spending $5 million per annum outside the office, to find parking and just to use their spaces more efficiently they forecast that we'd save them $2 million pre-COVID.

Kylie Davis: (19:40)

Wow.

Mosstyn Howell: (19:42)

Obviously they've cancelled the entire 5 million now. So they're saving all that. But that was happening prior. The spaces were just being wasted, not using properly, exactly the same as your remote working or remote desk type of testing solution type of scenarios. So we were mirroring the hub testing solution with that.

Kylie Davis: (20:06)

Okay. So how did you come to start up UbiPark? What's your background?

Mosstyn Howell: (20:09)

I'm a parking geek, Kylie.

Kylie Davis: (20:09)

I didn't know there was such a thing.

Mosstyn Howell: (20:20)

You can breed it. It's funny. You don't grow up wanting to be a parking person, but once you get in it, it's hard to get out. So I've been in the industry 23 years, a variety of jobs with Wilson Parking originally managing car parks. So I've done everything from stamping early birds on roofs to running operations here in Australia and New Zealand. I then got into the technology sales and I was selling products like SKIDATA and Schott and Markman, and parking guidance solutions like Indect that you see in our shopping centres. And I was tasked in my last role before UbiPark is finding solutions from around the world to bring it back into ... we were selling into Australia and New Zealand and the Philippines. And that's where I saw for the first time a solution where a phone can open a barrier. At the time my ... the company I was working for wasn't interested and I thought it was ... I've always had an entrepreneurial-

Kylie Davis: (21:16)

No-brainer.

Mosstyn Howell: (21:16)

... spirit and it was the right idea to go and kick it off and have a crack myself.

Kylie Davis: (21:23)

Awesome. So, what's your charging model?

Mosstyn Howell: (21:28)

Yeah. So we've got a ... There's some small upfront fees, depending on what we're doing. There is some hardware that goes into ... be it the barriers or the roller doors, or sliding gates. And then we have a SAS model. So we've got some product licence fees and some transaction fees based on what we're doing. So it's very cost effective to ... instead of some of the parking equipment that people are putting in, it's very expensive, the licence plate recognition cameras, which we can utilise if they're in and we do in a lot of sites. If you're looking to weigh that up against so the Bluetooth solution, it's about five or six times less.

Kylie Davis: (22:08)

Right. Wow. Okay. So if you've already done a big investment in infrastructure in your car park it's not going to go to waste. You can add this into it, but if you haven't, then it's a more affordable way to go ahead.

Mosstyn Howell: (22:20)

Correct. Yeah. So it's horses for courses too. So the idea is that flexibility, not every building's going to be the same and have the same requirements. So we have a matrix that you can pick and choose from that can be plugged in and out. So we've been trading with around 50 different technology solutions, not just parking. So, a lot of the parking systems, a lot of the parking guidance in our smart city solutions, we're doing a lot of stuff with enforcement solutions. Yeah. So there's lots of different ... we integrated to CRMs and BI tools and the likes that any of the customers may want to use.

Kylie Davis: (23:02)

So enforcement, that means if I booked in for two hours and I stay for two hours and five minutes, you're going to charge me extra or send me a fine or ...

Mosstyn Howell: (23:13)

Just so you get it clear Kylie, I'm not charging you for your-

Kylie Davis: (23:15)

No, okay. All right.

Mosstyn Howell: (23:15)

I'll take it. Someone else will send it. But no the work in an on-street solution in smart city world. So, if you pay for parking on the street and you do a start stop transaction, we need to send that information off to the enforcement officer. So those integrations where we're passing licence plate details and paper details through to the enforcement solution.

Kylie Davis: (23:39)

Okay. So, UbiPark is not just for big commercial buildings or apartment buildings, it's actually also for our on-street parking?

Mosstyn Howell: (23:50)

Yeah. We've got a digital solution for the entire ecosystem, which is what's unique around our platform. There's not a way out there to cover the entire lot. So we've got ... that's what we talked about that, so that pay by phone solution. Melbourne it's EasyPark and PayStay, and Sell a Park up in Brisbane. That solution is available. So if you don't have any barriers, you've got an open air lot, we can do a parking transaction and control that. We do digital permits where we use the licence plate as your permit so it replaces windows stickers and all sorts of things.

Mosstyn Howell: (24:27)

So we've got online booking solutions. Yeah. We've got the drive up solution's obviously the one that's driving the most demand for us. We've the app will open boom gates. But for everything that you can think of, we just created a solution as part of a transport for New South Wales initiative, where we've got a street sign scanner on the app coming next week. So you'll be able to scan the sign on the street and they'll tell you whether you can park there or not.

Kylie Davis: (24:56)

Oh, awesome. Okay. And if I've got it in my phone, in my car, appropriate use of mobile phones in cars notwithstanding, but is it going to help direct me to a spot if I'm looking for one, if I'm a driver?

Mosstyn Howell: (25:12)

Yeah. So the first thing legally, our app is legal if you use it in a cradle-

Kylie Davis: (25:17)

Okay. Good to know.

Mosstyn Howell: (25:17)

... so it's a driver-assisted application. So, and the great news with what we're doing with Porsche, it's going to become a car player.

Kylie Davis: (25:24)

Right.

Mosstyn Howell: (25:24)

So you'll be able to use it in the dash in your car. So that's ... I might have jumped the gun on that one, Kylie, but I'm sure the listeners that want to talk to us about the car player, I'm happy to talk to them about that. That'll hit the market next year and Porsche will be our first customer utilising that. So, that's great. But yeah, it's ... we can show you live vacancy, we can show you all the parking information, even things like height clearance is really important.

Mosstyn Howell: (25:53)

So our own we can search feature is to give people all the information they need to make a decision on where they're going to park. So they don't get to a place that's full or closed, or they can't get into because the height clearance is too low for their van. And that's where we have a real ... and we navigate people to the front of the car park. So Google might navigate you to the street address, which might actually be in the car park like at the back of the building. So we'll navigate you there. And that's how we have the positive impacts of traffic congestion.

Kylie Davis: (26:24)

Okay. Awesome. Okay. Because I live in the inner city, like in the inner West of Sydney and so carpark ... there's never any car parking around here. Anything you can do to fix that would be fantastic. So I've got a tricky question for you Mosstyn. With the rise of Google and self-driving cars, are we going to need car parks in sort of five to 10 years?

Mosstyn Howell: (26:45)

It's a fair question, Kylie. I've been ... the reason why UbiPark is set up the way it is is to actually take advantage the autonomous vehicles. So there's a couple things I've got to say there. I think the driver at the moment it's being made to be the problem in our smart city solution. So you'll see all these mobility as a service solutions that won't include the driver in the solution, they're actually trying to get to that driver to get them off the road onto another mode of ... a more sustainable mode of transport. So what we're doing in that mobility area is we're actually saying, "Let's take the driver out of the motorist part of the solution and bring them into that place." So that's the first thing that we're doing in that area, but the autonomous vehicles will make our roads more efficient. So we'll be able to utilise the road better. So that'll have a positive impact to congestion. But if we use it the same way we're using it now, they have potential to actually increase congestion.

Kylie Davis: (27:43)

Right.

Mosstyn Howell: (27:44)

So if I own an autonomous vehicle, so it comes down to car ownership as well, and I drive to work and then I send it home and then it comes back and picks me up. It's doing four trips instead of two.

Kylie Davis: (27:59)

Yup.

Mosstyn Howell: (28:01)

But what we're looking at is that if we don't think the government's going to allow these people to go very far without anyone in it for that reason. And we think that the car park of the future is the service station. So somewhere where the autonomous vehicle can be stored overnight if it's not being used. It can be recharged. It can be serviced. It can have tyres changed and washed. And they're going to need information in places, somewhere around to be able to do that. So we think parking's a $700 billion industry worldwide at the moment, we see it growing year-on-year.

Mosstyn Howell: (28:40)

And I think the autonomous vehicle, I'd say three or four years ago, it had sort of more hype about it, and there was a real push, but yeah, with what's happened with COVID, we're seeing people jumping back into the cars to get back into the office and not public transport. And that's going to obviously drive a little bit more in the early stages until we're comfortable we get back on PT. But yeah, there's I think autonomous vehicles is something I'll be jumping on as soon as I can. And, but there's a few things that need to happen for it to have the ... It's not the silver bullet to congestion and it won't kill car parks in the first instance, I don't think.

Kylie Davis: (29:22)

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Kylie Davis: (30:06)

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Mosstyn Howell: (30:40)

Yeah. So I didn't say A&P Capital's probably a good one that we've just put it up in Brisbane. I mean, we're working across obviously all the different areas but in the commercial real estate we provided A&P with a solution into building sublet at Milton. Sunsuper are the main tenant in there. That will be for a solution to get people back into the office safely and flexibly, that shared environment. So that's providing a real added value back to the tenant, they're now being able to get their staff back into the office safely in their return to work plan.

Mosstyn Howell: (31:19)

We're working with companies like Hobart Airport, where we're doing you pretty much everything digital at Hobart. We do the taxi management solution. We do the online booking. We do an account-based solution for buses to pick up and drop off. So there's all sorts of flexibility. We're also working with Charter Hall on a trial at Martin Place. Similar around getting flexibility in allowing that outdoor parking to get more better utilisation out of that space. Yeah. So there's most of the problems, major property owners are now looking at our technology. And I think that's sort of been a shift since the start of COVID.

Kylie Davis: (32:16)

Yeah. So UbiPark was in the first Reach Australia cohort or Asia Pac cohort. Tell us about your involvement in that programme.

Mosstyn Howell: (32:16)

Yeah. We were lucky enough and I wasn't sure about it 12 months ago when we went into it, Kylie, but it's been an absolutely amazing experience, the Reach programme. I didn't know a lot about Reach and the NAR back then and how big the family is. And I know you're part of that. So you understand that, but for me, Shelly and the team that sort of run that programme here in Australia, they've opened up a massive amount of doors for UbiPark. They've definitely given us a lot of ... they've straightened us up and focused a lot around how we get our products in and then they've opened up doors for ... so we've done deals straight out of the Reach programme. Charter Hall was started with an introduction with Sheridan, their CTO, had a good chat. And then next step we've got a solution in at 1 Martin Place, which was amazing.

Kylie Davis: (33:15)

That's a great one.

Mosstyn Howell: (33:17)

We're working at ... the one that's really exciting for me as a parking geek, Kylie, is Shelly's introduced us to a property developer in Manila and they own the entire roads and building, shopping centres, the whole lot. And they've given us a blank piece of paper to draw up a digital parking strategy for them and deliver that. So that's been amazing, but I'm not sure if it's ... We've sort of missed out on some of the events, obviously in COVID, but on the switch, on the other side of that is we've been able to ... We've had introductions into people in the US, people in Hong Kong, people in Singapore and we're looking at doing deals across all those countries with large companies like Goodman's and Comfy and Siemens and stuff that we probably wouldn't have been able to get to by ourselves.

Kylie Davis: (34:17)

Fantastic. So big shout out to all the guys at Reach. Howdy. So what do you think the next five years hold in real estate and the parking ... and where parking collide? Sorry about the collide.

Mosstyn Howell: (34:35)

Well, I think we're seeing real change. So I think, if I go back and typical Proptech story, that it's always a little bit slower than you'd like to be able to move or to show the value to the property owner, for instance, in the solution. But I think the mindset change since March is making that a lot easier and there's definitely ... Everyone's rethinking how they do everything, not just parking obviously. So I think there's going to be a big push there, but for me, it's not a part. We see parking, single parking applications dying.

Mosstyn Howell: (35:15)

That to me, it's integrating with a smart property apps or connected cars like we're doing with Porsche, a mobility as a service apps. So parking as a service that should fit in that bigger ecosystem. So we're in a lot of discussions with companies like Equian and Post and Comfy around bringing parking into that solution. So it's part of the bigger smart property solution. So I think that's probably the big change. I think parking needs to sit in there and people don't want to be downloading an application to do parking and then an application to open the door, or order their catering, or book their boardroom, that could also be done from the one platform.

Kylie Davis: (35:55)

So what you're doing is you're white labelling things and incorporating it into bigger pieces of tech that tenants are using or ...

Mosstyn Howell: (36:04)

Yeah, we've got an integration in a white label. So you won't see a lot of UbiPark, you can download our app, instal it, but that's not our focus. Our focus has been creative solutions for property owners that are white labelled and integrated it into bigger solutions. So yeah, for instance, the Porsche solution, it's going to be branded Porsche. Your Arevo solution to do with RACV is branded Arevo and they're just using our technology in there. We're having many discussions. We haven't done ... we're very close to doing a couple in the Proptech space. We're working on a couple of big projects and we bring parking into that bigger Eco Smart Property application ecosystem, allowing the tenant to be able to do everything from that one application.

Kylie Davis: (36:53)

Well, who knew that parking could be sexy, Mosstyn?

Mosstyn Howell: (36:58)

Well, I did but it's hard to convince a lot of people, but I mean, it is a big part of some of these buildings. So I think, there is a focus for property managers and owners on it, but it's probably not as glamorous as some of the other areas of property.

Kylie Davis: (37:16)

No, I think you've done a great job helping us understand the value of it to both the building owners and to tenants, and even to kind of the broader world. So thank you so much for being on the Proptech Podcast. It's been great to talk to you.

Mosstyn Howell: (37:34)

Thanks Kylie, I really appreciate you having me.

Kylie Davis: (37:36)

So that was Mosstyn Howell from UbiPark, a self-confessed parking junkie who has a great story for building owners. With COVID changing how we work, making us require more flexibility about when we come into the office and more anxious about using public transport, I think the work that UbiPark are doing is perfectly timed. The old model of building owners having their parking space managed by third-party businesses, or the parking being the really grungy basement of an elegant high-rise is truly right for disruption. The processes of giving people access to parking is typically slow, paper-based, inflexible and laborious, which is ironic because usually people drive because they want to get somewhere quick. And allowing these old models to continue is the underutilization of a really valuable asset, and also adding to the carbon load on the environment.

Kylie Davis: (38:27)

I also love that they're working with existing building infrastructure and don't require a lot of hardware, that it's all literally in an app on a phone. If you're a commercial landlord or property manager, it's worth reaching out to UbiPark to see how you could work together. So now, if you have enjoyed this episode of the Proptech Podcast, I would love you to tell your friends, or drop me a line, either via email kylie@realcontent.guru on LinkedIn or Facebook. And you can follow this podcast on Spotify, Google podcasts, Apple, iTunes, and Anchor.

Kylie Davis: (39:00)

I'd also like to thank my audio support, Charlie Hollands, and the fabulous Jill Escudero, who makes this podcast possible. And our sponsors Direct Connect, making moving easy, Smidge Wines, small batch hand-crafted wines and HomePrezzo now part of ActivePipe and making email marketing easier than ever before. So thanks everyone, until next week, stay safe and keep on Propteching.