Divvy set to disrupt CBD car parking industry

Commercial property giants DEXUS Property Group, GPT Group and Knight Frank have signed new partnership arrangements with tech start-up Divvy Parking, which has developed an airbnb-style platform to unlock the latent value in the thousands of under-used car parking spaces around Australia.

Divvy Parking also announced it has secured $2.5 million in a Series A funding round, to expand and scale its smart solution that connects commuters with affordable commercial parking spaces.

Both deals accelerate the parking platform’s expansion from a peer-to-peer service into the commercial property sector. 

Funding will fast-track the roll-out of industry-changing access technology, transforming how people access short and long term parking by opening up under-utilised short and long term spaces.  

Under the terms of the new partnerships the property groups will use the Divvy platform to assist in the management of their extensive car parking assets, enabling them to rent out unused spaces for short or long term periods.

Divvy had also recently signed with office tower tenant services provider Inlink, which it said would potentially give it access to a further 50 per cent of the commercial office tower market. 

The firm was originally founded as a peer-to-peer company similar to Airbnb letting individual users rent its parking spaces.

But Divvy founder and CEO Nick Austin advised the company had since pivoted to make commercial property providers its primary target for monetising the platform.

Some 80% of the company's revenue now came from corporate clients.

Knight Frank managing director Aaron McGhee say he had seen improvements in the management of its parking assets since the early days of its partnership with Divvy.