Guest Parking Advice

My HOA is very old school when handling guest parking.

A resident has to go to the clubhouse to get a parking pass and then when guest arrives, place the pass on the dash.

This wouldn’t be a problem normally but our property consists of eight buildings, six parking garages, six smaller parking lots and a clubhouse across 46 acres.

1296 units on the property. Each building has 162 units. There are about 5-7 guests parking spots in each of the five lots. The rest of the 40ish guest spots are being rented out to home owners.

So as you can tell, very limited parking, and we have to walk sometimes very long distances from our unit to the clubhouse to the guest parking spot we receive (wherever we can get in one of he five lots), then back to our unit.

Any suggestions to simplify and shorten are guest parking dilemma?

How does your HOA handle guest parking ?

Thank you

Sorry, I should be more clear about the process of actually getting the piece of paper was is the “pass”.

Resident goes to clubhouse (must go when office is open), resident has to show member id, then fill out a piece of paper with our name and phone.number. Tell the clear clerk the date and exact start and end time the pass is needed and our preferred lot. If the lot is not available, it’s then a guessing game of adjusting your time to find desired lot. If you do not want to do that, then you end up getting a lot that really far from your unit. After the spot is chosen, the clear prints two passes. One they give to resident with guest parking lot, parking spot number, date and time, and clerks initial. The other copy they place in a parking binder in the office for “verification” and “reference”.

I'm assuming a community this size has a website. If you have a management company odds are they have one. The process you described would be easy to automate. Obviously this will cost some money but it seems to me it's time to come out of the dark ages and streamline this process through automation. Searching for the nearest space available and then printing a pass is not a hi tech problem to solve.

The procedures the OP mentions are not just outdated, they are bizarre. Easy to fix.

But, first, given the incredible lack of visitor parking, why would the association rent parking visitor spots to owners?

I have no clue. They were all guest parking until about 2007. Then all of a sudden, they were rental spaces. I have reviewed the last 15 years of board agendas and minutes , and I did not see anything in them stating this change. It just happened one day. Strange because parking is very tight. And from what I understand, in order to give up a common area to a single owner, there must be member vote.