How AirGarage Is Solving Complex Problems Through Being A Fully-Managed Solution

It does sound like, you know, there's a somewhat, I would say, like an industry that you're operating in that's, you know, it has a lot of complexities to it. And, you know, you're able to come in and add a lot of value, you know, being more fully managed. So could you maybe share a little bit more about, you know, what some of those specific kind of problems that you're helping solve for and then, you know, ways that you're able to add value as a platform and more full-stack management?

Yeah, definitely. So Air Garage, the way to think about Air Garage is that we're effectively, you know, sort of a technology-driven property management firm. So if you've ever lived in an apartment building or an office building, you know that there's a firm that is managing it day to day, making sure that trash gets taken out, making sure that tenants have what they need and all those things. So we basically do that, but for parking lots. So we have to collect the payments from drivers, like I mentioned before. So we have this whole system for people to pay either through a web payment system, which is the vast majority of people pay, or through our mobile app. And then on top of that, we also have to make sure that we're coordinating vendors and things to do trash pickup, do cleaning, all those types of things. And then on top of that, we also have sort of a third side to our marketplace. So there's drivers, there's owners, and then we also have this third side, which we call the Space Force. And that Space Force is basically our enforcement team, which goes through parking lots and enforces to make sure that people have actually paid. And that's been actually one of the critical components of how we've been able to scale. I mean, we manage, like I said, 250 properties across 40 states. Most traditional parking companies they can't enter a new market unless they hire a full-time general manager. But we operate properties in most major metro areas at this point, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, all the major metros. And then also in places like Clarksburg, West Virginia, which is a town of 14,000 people in rural West Virginia. It's like you can't operate there as a traditional management company because you have so much overhead, right? And so our technology that we've built and the enforcement method of doing enforcement that we built through this sort of marketplace of gig workers that do enforcement for us is what enables us to operate nationally and drive a lot of value for owners. And so the interesting thing for us as a business that we sort of do uniquely is we come to the owner and we say, okay, look, the basics that you should expect from any management company that's going to run your lot is that they're going to pick up the trash, they're going to take out the snow, they're going to do these basic things. But then the question is, What are they doing on top of that to increase your gross revenue? And for us, that's the name of the game because our incentive is aligned directly with the owner, where most management companies, they just pass through all of the expenses of managing the property onto the owner's P&L, and they just pass through as many expenses as they can get away with until the owner starts crying uncle. And so we're going to them saying, hey, we're going to work on a revenue share. We're going to cover all the expenses of managing the property out of our portion of that revenue share. And then what that means is that our incentive is how do we increase your revenue and therefore increase the volume that's flowing through our marketplace through things like real-time dynamic pricing that is experiment-driven, through things like online advertising, through things like better technology. All of those things are going to increase the GMV that's flowing through our marketplace and through your property, which then makes both of us more money, which is the best case. So there's definitely a lot that goes into managing parking properties, probably a lot more than I'm even successfully describing right now. There's just a lot of dirty work that goes into it. But then really where our differentiation is, is that, hey, on top of that dirty work that we're going to do, there's all this technology that we've built that has never really existed in the industry in a meaningful way, even though people have been talking about it for 20 years. And the only reason we can do all of that is because we're this full-stack vertically integrated company that then can onboard supply to that marketplace and then add a lot of value to it.