Embracing the Future, From Online Applications to Robot Parking

I’m driving home from my office in the financial district when my GPS beeps twice, rerouting me off the Henry Hudson Parkway onto Broadway. There’s bad traffic on the highway, the GPS tells me, and I don’t question it because I’ve learned by now that, in such matters, the machines know best. 

My wife and I are going to Boca Raton tomorrow for a week’s respite from this never-ending winter. The board has a prospective buyer who has not completed her application package. In the past, I’d be calling the front desk every 30 minutes to see if her pages had arrived. Not anymore. Our co-op has gone paperless. I was one of the board’s last holdouts, but I finally caved. The industry-wide trend toward paperless applications has made boards more organized while simultaneously beefing up security on sensitive material.

Since its launch in April of last year, BoardPackager, a new electronic building due-diligence program that helps streamline the application process, has been making our board’s life simpler. I talked to founder Jim Brune about it, and he said his company works with property managers for more than 1,000 buildings. By charging $45 per application, his work allows boards to save considerably. “If you have a 300-page board package and it requires seven copies, given all the back and forth with couriers, FedEx, all of these things, it’s 550 to 600 bucks to do all those copies,” Brune says. 

He told me that his service uses banking-security protocols to ensure that the documents remain in safe hands. Even better, board members can view applications from any web-enabled device, allowing them to untether themselves from their physical mailboxes. The future is now. I don’t need to wait around for that balky buyer to finish her application. Florida sunshine, here I come. 

I pull up to the robotic parking lot in front of the building, and roll my Acura slowly into the entry room. Light and motion sensors analyze the size of my car, adjusting its place on the pallet. I get out and head to the computer kiosk, where I answer the same three questions. Is the car off? (Yes.) Is the car empty? (Yes. Well, empty enough.) Do I have my car keys? (Sure. Left jacket pocket.) Then the kiosk spits out a card for me to take and the entry room door slides closed on my vehicle, the system spinning it 180 degrees, and tucking it away with a series of pulleys and sensors.

When the board first discussed it, I didn’t love this idea either. No offense, robots, but I don’t trust you guys and was just getting used to the idea of having you vacuum my floors. But the board treasurer showed me the potential savings, and that changed my tune. Later, I spoke with Sean Coughlin, the chief marketing officer at Automotion, who told me that the automated “rack-and-rail” parking system his company installs works out to between $22,500 and $28,500 per spot, plus roughly $65 monthly per space to cover monitoring and quarterly maintenance. Overall operational costs, Coughlin said, are “about a third of a valet garage.” The biggest source of savings is that, by stacking cars, robotic parking can provide two to three times the parking density of a traditional garage or lot. 

“If you have a 100-car need, then either you have the space or you don’t,” Coughlin said. “If you already do have the space, then with us you can make better use of your property. You could do all sorts of things with that [additional] space.” 

As a result, the robotic parking business is booming. In 2006, Automotion unveiled its first robotic 68-car garage on Baxter Street in Chinatown. Today, the company operates six garages (and about 500 spots) in the Greater New York area, with nine more projects (and 1,800-plus spots) in the area under construction. 

From online applications to robot parking, our co-op has come around to realize that the future is now.