Atlanta's Free Parking Era Is Ending — And Landlords Are Cashing In

Atlanta’s commercial landlords are putting a new price tag on the city’s long-running love affair with cars.

Landlords have been beset by rising interest rates, construction and insurance costs, and stubbornly high vacancy in recent years. Now many are pushing up parking prices — and converting once-free lots — to prop up their revenues. 

“These office buildings, they’re not making money, and that’s the only way to generate income,” Atlanta-based investor and broker Alan Joel said. “And it’s there. The infrastructure is there. The parking is there. It’s a way to get some income without spending a tremendous amount of capital.”

Owners of prime office towers, which are experiencing record availability, have pushed parking rates in their buildings up by 9.2% for reserved spaces and 4.7% for unreserved spaces, according to a 2024 CBRE report. 

“Over the next five to seven years, paid parking is expected to become the standard across many office portfolios as landlords seek to optimize revenue generation from parking assets,” said Brett Hunsaker, who is on the commercial real estate advisory board for Atlanta-based Universal Parking.

But rates are going up everywhere. Atlanta’s two-hour parking rate grew by 149% between 2019 and 2022, from $3.84 to $9.56, according to a global hourly parking rate study by Parkopedia, a parking services provider. 

Perimeter Mall, one of the more iconic suburban shopping centers in Metro Atlanta, transformed 300 of its up-front spaces into a paid lot. Brookfield Properties, which owns and operates Perimeter Mall, didn't return calls seeking comment. 

The owner of Forum North, a four-story, 91K SF suburban office building next to The Forum Peachtree Corners, is also now collecting fees to park on its formerly free surface lot, according to signage on the property. Miami-based Research Management Corp., the building's landlord, according to county records, didn't respond to messages seeking comment. 

“They got that asset. They've got you, and you can’t go anywhere else,” CBRE Associate Field Research Director Scott Amoson said. “Not surprising that we’re starting to see that, even around the suburbs.”

Gwinnett County, which owns Gas South District, home of the Atlanta Gladiators minor league ice hockey team, turned its sea of asphalt and its parking deck into paid lots in 2021, nearly 30 years after the convention center was first built on the property, said Lisa Anders, the chief operating officer of Explore Gwinnett.

Rates on its more than 6,800 parking spots range from $5 to $25 overnight, and its revenues are used to maintain the parking facilities, including the deck, Anders said. 

“We were probably the only complex in town over the past five or six years that wasn’t charging for parking,” Anders said. 

Industry experts say there are myriad reasons for property owners to start treating parking lots like cash machines. Return-to-office mandates have helped boost parking demand, particularly at recently built towers that are attracting the majority of new leases. 

New developments are increasingly relying on paid parking to boost overall revenues and help recoup construction costs — each spot in a new deck can cost $50K, Hines Senior Director Nick Garzia said. Landlords of existing properties create new revenue streams, particularly in markets where available lots and decks are limited.

Paid parking spots have long been part of the urban fabric of Atlanta. But their slow spread into suburbia is a relatively new phenomenon for a region that historically enjoyed free access for cars because developable land was plentiful and cheap, said Jeremy Greenwald, a parking and mobility consultant with Atlanta-based Walker Consultants.

But charging for space that was until recently free risks pushback from customers, even though developers forgoing parking revenue likely pass that cost on through rents to their tenants, which in turn will pass those costs on to the consumer.

“We’re a city of car culture where we expect free and front-door parking all the time,” Greenwald said. “We got that culture here in the South, and whether people want to believe that or not, the cost for a developer or landlord to build and manage parking, that gets passed down to the users.”

Retail customers might nevertheless decide to go elsewhere to eat or shop where parking is free. West Midtown business owners told Bisnow last month that prohibitively expensive parking is one of the contributors to a rash of restaurant failures in the area.

“Everybody is looking to squeeze that extra dime out,” said Peter Kruskamp, president of The Shumacher Group, one of the city’s more prominent retail brokerages. “I think it’s going to cause us to shop less and spend less. If I go over there to get a pillowcase and pay $5 to park, I’m just going to shop at Amazon, and it’ll be there the next day.”

While Class-A parking prices have spiked, rates have been largely flat at Class-B and C buildings, according to CBRE. Amoson wrote that some owners of lower-quality buildings have started to offer free parking as an incentive to tenants. 

“There’s always been a thing where we Georgians don’t like to pay for parking,” Kruskamp said. “We don’t like to walk, and we have a lot of options, so we’ll drive right past a spot.” 

Landlords need to find a balance on the price to charge for parking or risk shoving off potential customers to competing centers, Hines' Garzia said. He handles retail leasing at Atlantic Station, which offers free parking for the first two hours and $3 an hour after. He said the added fee hasn't hurt its tenants' sales.

“I think if you look at a lot of large cities, people get used to paying for parking. I think Atlanta is just really following the trend,” Garzia said. “Landlords are just looking for different streams of revenue to cover the pro forma of these projects.”