Developers spend a disproportionate amount of design energy on the parts of a luxury building that buyers will photograph: the lobby, the rooftop lounge, the finishes inside the unit. Parking rarely gets the same attention, even though it’s one of the first and last things every resident experiences on any given day.
“There’s a gap between what gets designed for buyers and what buyers actually register once they move in,” says Christopher Tiessen, President/CEO of KLAUS Multiparking America, who has spent years in conversation with developers, architects, and building operators about how these decisions get made. “Buyers aren’t evaluating parking the way a developer or an engineer does. What they notice is much simpler.”
The experience buyers notice
According to Tiessen, luxury buyers tend to register a handful of things, none of which are technical.
How long it takes to get the car, and how long it takes to leave it. In a building with a well-run system, retrieval feels closer to valet than to self-park. When it doesn’t, residents notice immediately, and it tends to become the kind of complaint that travels fast through a building’s social circuit.
Whether the garage feels like part of the building or like an afterthought. Ramps, exhaust, low ceilings, and long walks to an elevator read as “parking structure.” A clean, quiet arrival sequence reads as an extension of the lobby. Buyers rarely articulate the distinction in words, Tiessen says, but they feel it every time they come home.
Whether EV charging is simply there. This has shifted quickly, in his observation. A few years ago, EV charging in a luxury building was a feature developers highlighted on a floor plan. Today, for a growing share of buyers, it functions more like an assumption, closer to an in-unit washer and dryer than a bonus amenity. The question buyers ask isn’t whether charging exists, but whether it will be available when they need it, which is a different design problem for a developer to solve.
Noise and cleanliness at the resident level, not underneath the hood. Nobody touring a unit asks what system moves the cars. What they notice is whether the garage is dim and echoing, or whether it feels considered.
What buyers generally don’t notice
The mechanics of how a parking system works are, by design, almost entirely invisible to the buyer. Whether a building uses valet staff, a semi-automated puzzle system, or a fully automated platform rarely factors into a buyer’s decision, as long as the experience on the other side of that choice is fast and predictable.
“Developers sometimes assume buyers are evaluating parking technology the way they’d evaluate a kitchen appliance brand,” Tiessen says. “In my conversations with developers, that hasn’t been the pattern. Buyers evaluate outcomes, not mechanisms.”
That distinction, he argues, has implications for where developers put their design and marketing effort. The technology choice is largely a back-of-house decision that affects unit count, ceiling heights, and how much space is left over for the amenities buyers do notice. The buyer-facing decision is really about arrival time, noise, and whether the garage feels integrated into the rest of the building.
A project that illustrates the point
At a luxury condominium project in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, the development team was working with a tight site and a premium design brief. The system installed there, a fully automated, two-tiered structure providing 24 parking spaces, with EV charging built into the platforms so vehicles can charge while stored, wasn’t designed to be something residents think about day-to-day. From the resident’s side, the experience is simply: pull in, hand off the car, walk into the building.
“What made that project work wasn’t the technology itself,” Tiessen says. “It’s that the technology disappeared into the experience, which freed up space for the amenities that actually get photographed.”
The takeaway for developers
Parking decisions in luxury multifamily are still often made as engineering decisions first and experience decisions second, according to Tiessen. The buyers who will live with that decision tend to evaluate it in the reverse order. Starting with the arrival experience a developer wants to create, then working backward into the site constraints and system choice that deliver it, tends to produce a different outcome than starting from the mechanical question and hoping the experience follows.
That reordering, more than any single feature, is what separates a garage buyers tolerate from one they don’t think about at all.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
