Regina start-up paves the way for technology in parking industry

After starting out as an AirBnB for parking stalls two years ago, a Regina start-up is paving the way for technology in the parking industry.

Matt Fahlman and Kyle Smyth, co-founders of Offstreet, created software in the form of an iPhone app to help drive down parking problems near Regina General Hospital. Residents could sign up to rent out their driveways and drivers could book parking spots through their smartphones.

But, the simple concept quickly moved from a niche market to a commercial web application.

“Basically, what happens is you got the business that has the relationship with the parking company that has the relationship with us,” Fahlman said.

Instead of focusing on private residents to turn a profit, the Offstreet founders came up with a bigger, better business model. The pair shutdown the smartphone app earlier this year and transferred some of their inventory to a Toronto-based app, Rover, which essentially provides the same services.

“(Rover) just focuses on that full-time, whereas we don’t,” Fahlman said. “We just didn’t have the development resources to maintain the app.”

Now, Fahlman and Smyth sell their software primarily to parking management companies throughout Western Canada and the United States. The pair works with institutional, commercial and residential companies like universities, apartment and office buildings, and hotels.

“We do a lot of work with hotels where there’s an automated check-in process, where the guest doesn’t have to pay at a meter on site,” Fahlman said. “The hotel concierge can enter their license plate into our software and then our software talks to the parking management companies back-end.”

In Regina, the software is mostly used to manage customer parking at the strip mall along Kramer Boulevard.

The software is a better fit for larger cities, according to the founders. Offstreet currently operates in Edmonton, Vancouver, San Francisco and Denver. Fahlman said they recently signed a deal with a company in New Orleans.

“You need to have a certain density to kind of necessitate the problem that we’re solving,” Fahlman said.

Fahlman is moving to Vancouver in the new year to help manage customers in their busiest city. But the company’s home base will continue to operate in Regina out of the Conexus Credit Union’s Cultivator for the foreseeable future.

“There’s just a lot of support at the Saskatchewan level, you just wouldn’t get at a bigger centre,” Fahlman said, pointing to provincial tax credits and start-up incubators for tech companies in Regina and Saskatoon.