A workable guest scheme needs exactly three numbers: how many guest days each apartment gets per month, the maximum length of a single guest stay, and how many guest vehicles an apartment may have registered at once. Set those three, make registration take under a minute, and publish the numbers on the signs. Everything else is detail.
Picking the three numbers
Guest days per month: most associations land between 10 and 20 per apartment. Below 10, ordinary social life starts hitting the ceiling and residents feel policed. Unlimited, and the scheme cannot distinguish a guest from a second household car.
Maximum stay: 24 hours covers dinner guests and overnight visitors; 3–7 days covers visiting family. Choose based on how scarce your spaces are — scarcity argues for shorter stays.
Concurrent guest vehicles: one or two per apartment. This is the number that quietly prevents the 'registered my flatmate's car as a permanent guest' workaround.
The flow decides whether rules are followed
Rules are only as good as the registration flow. If registering a guest requires an account, a password, and five minutes, residents will skip it and dare the controller. The flow that works: the resident sends the guest a link, the guest enters their plate, and the registration is live before they've parked.
No app installation for the guest, no login, no codes read out over the phone. The resident keeps control of their guest budget in the app; the guest just types a plate.
The four classic abuse patterns — and the counter for each
- The permanent guest (a second household car registered as guest) → cap concurrent guest vehicles and monthly guest days
- The commuter borrow (a friend who works nearby parks daily) → monthly budget makes this expensive in guest days
- The forgotten checkout (guest left, registration still running) → auto-expiry instead of manual end times
- The neighbor-favor chain (resident registers cars for non-residents) → visible per-apartment usage in the admin dashboard
10-20
Guest days per apartment per month
The range most associations choose
24t-7d
Typical maximum single stay
Scarcer spaces, shorter stays
<1
Minute to register a guest
Above that, compliance drops fast
We spent two years arguing about guest parking limits. The argument ended the week people could see the numbers: most apartments used six guest days a month. The ceiling of fifteen affected almost no one.
Issuing a guest permit
A guest permit is a plate plus a window of time. The resident fills in both, and the permit exists. No key, no paper, no call to a board member on a Sunday. Expired permits drop out of the list on their own.
The quota per home sits in the same view. That is what makes the rule enforceable without an argument — the count is visible to the resident, not just to the board.
Filter the demo to active or expired permits — expiry happens on its own, which is the point.
Guest parking
- 3. tvToday 14:00 – 22:00AB 90 114 Active
- 2. th12 – 14 AugQR 71 288 Active
- St. th15 – 16 AugUV 22 907 Scheduled
- 4. tvYesterday 18:00 – 23:00WX 66 431 Expired
- 1. tv3 Aug 09:00 – 17:00ST 40 663 Expired
FAQ: Guest parking
Should guest parking be free for residents?
Within the monthly budget, yes — charging for ordinary guests creates more resentment than revenue. Some associations charge only beyond the free budget, which preserves fairness while funding the scheme.
What about craftsmen, home care and deliveries?
Treat them as a separate category with its own rules — for example a service window on weekdays, or admin-issued service permits. Mixing them into residents' guest budgets punishes people for getting their radiator fixed.
A guest got a control fee — the resident says they forgot to register. Now what?
Have a written first-time policy before it happens: many boards waive a first offense for a documented genuine guest, and hold the line from the second. Consistency matters more than strictness — the fastest way to lose legitimacy is waiving fees for board members' friends.