‘A lot of the time I can’t get a space and I have to park on the street nearby.’ Photograph: iStockMy apartment block has a lot of parking but it is not assigned and this is causing a lot of frustration. A lot of the time I can’t get a space because it’s full and I have to park on the street nearby in the evening. There are signs at the entrance to our block that say ‘residents only parking’ but I’m pretty sure it is not enforced.
The first task would be to get clarity as to which parking areas are privately owned by the OMC and which areas, if any, are in the public domain. In most apartment developments the common areas of the development should have been handed over by the original developer to the OMC and there will be legal maps showing their boundaries. These areas will be owned by the OMC and subject to their management with the OMC normally entitled to bring in reasonable rules and regulations to do this.
Whether it will be required to allocate specific spaces to specific owners will in part depend on how many spaces and how many apartments/cars there are. The legalities of doing so would need to be checked with the OMC solicitor. In some developments, there are more spaces than cars so there is no real need to manage this more closely.
Rather than allocating specific spaces to apartments, an option may be to introduce parking permits. If you have a clamping/parking management company, they will be able to assist on this. A standard system is that the property owner applies each year and supplies their car registration and their car is cleared to park in the car park. It may be that the first permit for each apartment can be provided at a nominal cost but a property owner would need to pay more for a second permit.