Are commercial parking services a good investment?

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

21 September 2025

John Mutua says he owns a piece of land within Machakos town centre and is thinking of converting it into a commercial car park. He says that “The plot measures 72ft by 144ft and I was wondering how many cars can comfortably fit inside. I am also wondering if this is a viable investment”.

This seems like a quarter-acre plot which was surveyed as 22m by 44m. The reason for these awkward dimensions is that Kenyans are yet to migrate to the metric system when it comes to land measurements – we are still stuck with acres even though our surveyors migrated to hectares many decades ago.

Any way; a comfortable parking space is about 2.5m wide and 5m long. So, 18 spaces can fit along the length of Mutua’s plot of land (44 divided by 2.5). If two rows are marked out on the opposite sides, the total number of parking spaces comes to 36 and this still leaves an area about 12m wide in the middle of the plot.

This middle space can take another 7 cars and still leave enough space for manoeuvring the vehicles in and out of the parking spaces. The total capacity now comes to 43 slots. The question that comes up is whether changing the arrangement can increase the capacity. Let’s find out.

The above calculation was done for 90-degrees or perpendicular parking; what if we rearranged it to flash/parallel parking? In that case, we don’t to leave a wide space in between the lines of cars. However, the length of each space needs to be increased a little bit to, say 6m. I tried this out on a piece of graph paper and I could only fit 35 parking slots in the same space. May be some one else can do a better job than me...

The question of whether this is a good business is not easy to answer. We need to know how much Mutua will charge for his parking as well as what it will cost to prepare the plot for parking services.

Now the county government of Machakos charges Sh100 per day for on street parking. My guess is that Mutua will have difficulty charging more that Sh200 per day. This would then be broken to an hourly amount of, say, sh50 but with a maximum of Sh200. This gives an estimated daily revenue of Sh8,600; which comes to Sh258,000 per month. This is just revenue; not profit! But it’s a good starting point for Mutua.