Dallas’ ParkHub expands into commercial real estate with latest acquisition

Dallas-based ParkHub is continuing to find new markets for its parking management technology with a deal to buy a California firm that works with commercial real estate owners.

Smarking, founded in 2014 by Wen Sang and Maokai Lin, is used at over 2,500 locations by commercial real estate owners, municipalities, hospitals, universities, airports and parking operators in North America.

George Baker, ParkHub’s founder and chairman, said he has known Sang for years and saw Smarking’s business grow. The San Francisco-based company specializes in working with transaction-level data to turn it into real-time business intelligence.

“We both always had an aligned vision for how the future state of parking works,” Baker told The Dallas Morning News on Tuesday.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. ParkHub came into the acquisition having raised nearly $120 million from investors. Smarking raised $3 million in seed funding in 2015, according to tracking site Crunchbase.

Smarking’s SmartPass parking reservation technology is used in office buildings such as Oakland City Center in the Bay Area, Indeed Tower in Austin and Cathedral Plaza in Cleveland. It also helped the Miami Parking Authority replace streetside meters with mobile payment.

Baker said entering the commercial office market makes business intelligence even more important because of the tenant and visitor base and parking turnover. Three to five years ago, parking operators didn’t have the technology ParkHub has built.

“You couldn’t understand those turnover rates in real-time because you had to count tickets,” Baker said. “You had to wait for reporting.”

Smarking’s Sang said the two companies have a shared vision of a “software-driven ecosystem that increases revenue and drives cost savings.”

“We see this as an opportunity to combine forces and really go next level, expedite and accelerate this progress, to help digitize the entire parking world,” said Sang, who came up with the idea of Smarking while struggling to find parking in Boston during his doctoral degree days at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Smarking will continue to run its business through the end of the year with Sang as CEO. Sang and Lin will move into roles on ParkHub’s executive team and Smarking’s 22 employees will join ParkHub.

ParkHub was founded in 2010 by Baker, a Dallas native who grew up in a parking operations family. His father co-founded Parking Company of America-Dallas. Before this deal, Baker said ParkHub had about 800 to 1,000 locations, working with a variety of professional sports teams and Super Bowl organizers.

Earlier this month, ParkHub, known locally for its parking lot technology at the American Airlines Center and AT&T Stadium, announced a new partnership with Los Angeles-based Oak View Group to expand its footprint across the country. Oak View Group owns and operates arenas such as the homes of the NHL’s Seattle Kraken and New York Islanders, as well as the Moody Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

In February, ParkHub received a growth investment of about $100 million from private equity firm LLR Partners. The company planned to use the capital to further develop its parking management and payment processing technology, as well as potential acquisitions. In 2021, the company acquired Dallas-based startup Bonfire, to make a move into campground management with its technology.