RISE Report Concludes: “A First Step for Property Owners Is to Map Parking Needs and Actual Use”

Last week, RISE published an exceptionally well-written report on mobility and parking for real estate:
“Cross-Industry System Design: Sustainable Mobility for Properties and Districts.”
One of its clearest takeaways is the following:

“A first step forward for property actors is to map parking needs, actual utilisation, and revenue flows in order to gain an accurate understanding of the value.”

The beginning and end of most journeys are buildings—homes, workplaces, retail, logistics hubs. This is the practical reason why the report highlights the increasingly crucial connection between Real Estate and Mobility. It outlines a process for collaboration between the two sectors and gives direction on where mobility within the built environment is heading, and what conditions must change to get there.

The report addresses precisely the “borderland” where Mobility46 operates together with our customers — and RISE has done an outstanding job articulating the challenges we see every day.

I have advocated for stronger collaboration between property owners, parking operators, and municipalities in every panel and workshop Mobility46 has participated in. Why? Because I have personally witnessed the friction that emerges when different systems and actors operate in silos across parking, EV charging, and mobility. Everyone does “their own thing” from “their own perspective.” The result is inefficiency and a slowdown in the transition toward better utilisation of the parking assets we already have.

At Mobility46, we describe the cross-industry system design highlighted in the report as the creation of a shared ecosystem — the foundation of what we call “The Future Car Park.”

When previously separate actors and systems must collaborate, barriers emerge

According to the report — and in our experience — collaboration challenges fall into four main categories:

1. Technology & Standards

Parking management has historically been highly manual. Technical solutions (if any) have been extremely simple (often Excel sheets) and rarely capable of communicating with other systems via APIs.

Today, however, buildings — including garages — are being digitalised. This requires cross-system communication between:

• Digital access systems
• Different brands of EV chargers (via OCPP)
• Mobility operators
• Parking management platforms
• Energy systems

Digitalisation brings enormous potential — but only if systems can talk to each other.

2. Legislation & Regulation

RISE identifies parking as a “critical issue” in achieving sustainable mobility.

One major barrier: Sweden’s tenancy law, specifically the indirect right of possession, which creates strong lock-in effects.
If a landlord wants to:

• shift from reserved to unreserved parking
• install EV chargers near electrical panels
• redesign the utilisation of the garage

…they often hesitate due to the legal risk of disturbing existing tenancy agreements.

Another regulatory challenge: non-VAT-registered housing associations (BRFs).
Because parking, mobility, and EV charging are considered VAT-liable services, BRFs cannot easily host external operators without becoming VAT-registered — something most will not do.

3. Business Models

For decades, the dominant model in Sweden has been block leases, where an operator rents the entire garage under a long contract. The operator then maximises their own profit, which often conflicts with the property owner’s goals related to sustainability, utilisation, or new mobility services (such as shared mobility).

This model no longer fits the needs of a fast-changing mobility landscape.

Fortunately, more property owners are now taking back control of their parking assets and integrating them into broader organisational goals, including sustainability and customer satisfaction.

Another issue:
Because parking teams often lacked technical tools, many owners avoided adjusting parking rents. Over time, this has resulted in widespread underpricing.

Modern Parking Management Systems (like Park46) now automate annual rent indexation, eliminating the problem entirely.

4. Culture

Every industry has its cultural defaults. In real estate, parking has long been viewed as an obligation — required by planning law — rather than a strategic asset.

Parking was considered:

• unprofitable
• risky
• disconnected from the “real” core business

This mindset must now change.

Parking — together with value-adding services like EV charging, shared mobility, digital access — is becoming essential for meeting customer expectations and supporting society’s climate transition.

In my view, it is obvious that property owners have a natural and central role in this transformation.

The shift is only beginning

Moving from car-centric mobility and outdated parking management to sustainable mobility hubs, dynamic parking models, and data-driven asset optimisation is still in its early stages.

While reading the report, two sentences gave me genuine goosebumps — because they perfectly articulate why my team and I have spent the last decade working with this (formerly dull, now incredibly exciting) asset: parking.

Here they are:

“It has been suggested that the actor who can solve parking can also solve mobility.”
(Rode et al., 2019)

and:

“A first step forward for property actors is to map parking needs, actual utilisation, and revenue flows in order to gain an accurate understanding of the value.”

This is the essence of why Mobility46 exists, why Park46 was built, and why we believe so strongly in “The Future Car Park” — an integrated mobility and parking ecosystem that brings real estate into the future.

Written by:

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John Asp

CEO & Co-Founder Mobility46

Connect with me on LinkedIn!