In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Alex Enchin from WhereiPark.

Who are you, and what do you do?

A relentless pursuer of opportunity, born and raised in Toronto, Canada. One of the two founders of WhereiPark, a marketplace for monthly parking. We partner with owners and managers of multifamily apartment communities in major North American cities to monetize under-utilized parking assets at those properties. We are allocated a portion of their excess parking capacity and connect those spaces with nearby companies through our web based platform. We handle all of the admin/management functions associated with renting corporate monthly parking (marketing, background checks, payments, security deposits, customer support, financial reporting, etc) and simply share the new revenue we generate with our real estate partners.

What problem does your product/service solve?

We solve a few problems that are closely related. We’re focused on using real estate more efficiently, maximizing utility from existing assets. For our real estate partners, optimizing their existing assets through our platform (without any incremental investment) leads to increased yield/profitability. It’s rare to be able to tap into an entirely new revenue stream without incurring any expense to do so. Lastly, by using technology to ‘unlock’ an exclusive and new supply of parking in major cities, we’re helping companies and their employees realize significant savings on parking expenditures. We offer companies and their people the ability to move from parking in public garages into secure, access-controlled residential buildings and often see savings of 15-20% on this budget item, that’s pretty meaningful to a lot of people.

What are you most excited about right now?

The most exciting thing right now from a business perspective is scaling what we’ve built and our traction in the U.S. after two years, to the next level. We currently have about 200 apartment communities in the U.S. and there’s a path in front of us to get to a few thousand properties. We’ve been fortunate to work with incredible real estate groups such as Equity Residential, Greystar, AvalonBay, JP Morgan, Essex, UDR, Aimco, Camden, Alliance and AMLI to help them create this exciting and profitable new revenue stream at many of their properties. On the flip side of our marketplace, we’re helping brand name companies like Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, and Snapchat solve parking challenges in major cities. The best part of our business is that we generate Win-Win-Win scenarios, we help companies solve parking needs and save money while real estate owners create new revenue and we’re compensated for connecting A and B.

What’s next for you?

Continuing our growth on the real estate partnership side and scale some of our relationships with the great real estate owners/managers I mentioned from 10-15 communities per company to 40-50 per company. There are a number of reall interesting strategic partnership opportunities that have presented themselves over the past year. We’ll be looking at some of these opportunities to get to the next level in our business.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Mental health has become an extremely personal cause and one that I’ve started to get involved in and plan to be for the long term. This is the greatest challenge of our time in my opinion. There are other areas of great concern, namely the planet/environment but we really need to do a much better job of taking care of each other.
 
While we’ve made incredible progress in the last number of decades in most areas of healthcare, when it comes to mental health, we’ve made nearly no progress. It’s clear that we need radically new ideas in this field to break the existing paradigm. Highly recommend Michael Pollan’s 2018 bestseller ‘How To Change Your Mind‘ on this very topic.

Meet The RE Tech EntrepreneurThanks to Alex for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).