A residents' association board in Utrecht is wondering whether automated parking management is worth it. Cars are regularly parked by non-residents, the barrier code has been circulating for years, and nobody wants to manually check every month who actually has the right to a space. What does it cost to fix that — and what does it concretely return?
Revtek · 15 May 2026
Most residents' associations with a gated car park still rely on a shared barrier code or a small stack of fobs. That works fine while the complex is small and everyone knows each other. Once you have more than twenty or thirty apartments, things start to fray.
Codes leak. Fobs get lost or passed on. The manager receives reports of unknown cars — but has no way to trace when they got in or who granted access. Enforcement only works with a parking attendant or personal inspection rounds, and that takes time that volunteer board members rarely have.
What "doing nothing" costs is rarely calculated. But add it up.
A parking attendant who comes by weekly easily costs €600 to €800 per month. A caretaker or concierge who also monitors the car park charges for hours. And the board's own management time — for complaints, the annual fob audit, sorting out replacement codes after each incident — is easily four to six hours per month. At €75 per hour for an external manager, that's €300 to €450 per month in invisible costs.
Combined, you're quickly looking at €900 to €1,200 per month — for a function that can be automated for a fraction of that.
The investment has two parts: hardware and platform.
On the hardware side, you need ANPR cameras and possibly a new barrier connection. A suitable outdoor camera costs €400 to €900 per unit depending on brand and specification. If the complex already has Axis, Hikvision or Dahua cameras installed, there's a good chance they're already ANPR-capable — in which case hardware costs are minimal or even zero.
For the platform, Revtek charges €175 per month per location. That includes the dashboard, barrier connection, visitor registration via WhatsApp, alerts on denied access and the full access log. No per-user fees, no separate module for visitor management. Full details on the pricing page.
Take a residents' association with 40 apartments and one gated car park. Current costs: a fortnightly attendant visit (€350/month) plus two hours of board time per month for parking complaints and fob admin (€150/month) = €500 per month.
After automation: €175/month for the platform, plus a one-off hardware investment of around €1,200 if two cameras are needed. That investment pays back in seven months based on direct cost savings alone. After that, you're saving €325 net per month.
Per apartment that's less than €4.40 per month. For comparison, the average residents' association service charge for maintenance and management already runs €80 to €150 per apartment per month. Parking management is a small but visible slice of that — and residents notice immediately when it works better.
Residents don't do anything differently. They drive up, the barrier opens on their plate — no code, no fob, no app. Visitors register themselves via a WhatsApp message or a link on the sign at the entrance.
That's the difference residents feel: no more visitors ringing their doorbell because they can't find the code, no more disputes about who's parked in their space, no more complaints to the board about unauthorised parking.
For associations with fewer than ten to fifteen spaces and little turnover, a manual system is still manageable. But as soon as visitors are regular, the plate list changes more than twice a year, or there are complaints about unauthorised parking, automation almost always pays for itself.
The clearest signal: if the board spends more than an hour per month on parking complaints or fob management, the payback period is almost always under a year. More on the specific approach for residential complexes on the residential complex page.
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