The number of parking spaces in an office building cannot be negotiated: it follows from the building's fixed parking ratio, typically 1 space per 100-160 m² in central Warsaw and 1 per 60-100 m² in Mokotów and the regional cities. Parking should be a cut-off criterion at the start of the process, not an item left until the end. What you can negotiate are flexibility mechanisms: priority on released spaces, a headcount growth clause, access to off-site parking and rotation models.
Did you know that you cannot “buy” extra parking spaces in a building once negotiations are being finalised? You may secure a lower rent or a larger fit-out budget, but if the building has a ratio of 1 space per 100 m², no amount of negotiating leverage will change that.
It is a bit like trying to book seats for a sold-out concert. You may hold the best credit card in the world, but if someone else clicked faster when tickets went on sale, the seats are gone, however much you are willing to pay.
At Brookfield Partners, where we advise office tenants only, parking is one of the first questions we ask when agreeing the assumptions for the process with a client. In practice, availability can have a significant impact on the choice of location, which is why we factor it in at the very start of the office search.
Where the limit comes from
The number of parking spaces in an office building is not a matter of the landlord's goodwill. It is determined by the building's design and by administrative decisions taken at the planning stage of the development, often many years before the first tenant signs a lease. In practice, this means the building has a predetermined parking ratio - and that ratio is fixed.
Location adds a further factor: the closer to the centre, the fewer spaces per square metre and the harder it is to secure an additional allocation. In practice, it looks like this:
| Location | Typical parking ratio |
|---|---|
| Warsaw - CBD / City Centre | 1 space / 100-160 m² |
| Warsaw - Wola | 1 space / 90-200 m² |
| Warsaw - Mokotów / Służewiec | 1 space / 60-90 m² |
| Regional cities (Gdańsk, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Łódź, Katowice) | 1 space / 60-100 m² |
A similar pattern can be seen between cities. Warsaw is currently where spaces are hardest to come by; in the regional cities the situation is, for now, somewhat easier - although there too, parking is increasingly what decides the choice of office.
Parking as a cut-off criterion, not an add-on
Many tenants treat parking as something to deal with “later”: first we choose the location, the building standard and the rent, and we will talk about spaces along the way. The problem is that a building which looks perfect on paper may, from the outset, have too few spaces to meet the team's actual needs - and no conversation at a later stage will fix that.
The number of available spaces increasingly shapes the shortlist of locations as much as the rent level or the building standard. It should be part of the analysis from the very beginning of the process - not as an extra question for the landlord, but as one of the criteria that immediately narrows down the realistic options. For companies with their own vehicle fleet, or those needing 20-30 spaces, even very attractive central locations are sometimes dropped from further analysis purely because of limited parking availability.
The market is changing: from fixed allocation to flexible management
A growing number of building owners are moving away from rigidly assigning specific spaces to specific tenants and introducing more flexible parking management models. This is a response to hybrid work: if 60% of the team is in the office on any given day, a fixed pool of spaces held “in reserve” for 100% of employees makes no economic sense. Our observations over recent years show that many companies have reduced their need for permanent spaces. In their place come solutions that are already operating on the market today:
- Parking operator - an external company manages the car park and allocates spaces flexibly according to current demand.
- Rotating spaces (shared parking) - employees share a pool of spaces in line with the hybrid working schedule.
- Flexible rental - a space can be booked for a day, a few days or a month via an app; this works well for employees who come in occasionally.
- App-based booking system - makes more efficient use of the available pool instead of keeping spaces free “just in case”.
- Visitor pool - dedicated spaces for clients and business partners that can be booked in advance.
- Sharing between tenants - one tenant's unused spaces can temporarily be made available to another.
- EV charging stations - increasingly standard, and also important from the perspective of the tenant's ESG policy.
An interesting alternative for those who would otherwise drive is cycling infrastructure: secure bike storage, changing rooms with drying facilities, showers and repair stations, which are increasingly common in new office complexes.
What can be negotiated, and when?
The building's fixed ratio cannot be changed, but the lease can include mechanisms that provide flexibility over time. Such provisions are not part of the standard lease template - you need to ask for them at the start of the process, not after the fact:
- Right to released spaces - if another tenant gives up spaces, you have priority to take them over.
- Headcount growth flexibility clause - a contractual right to additional spaces if your floor area or headcount grows.
- Access to off-site parking - the building owner may have an agreement with an external operator that the tenant can use.
It is also worth checking whether all the spaces in the building have already been allocated to tenants or whether the owner still has a pool of unlet ones. In practice, it is actual availability, rather than the ratio itself, that matters most to the success of the leasing process.
One of the first questions we ask a client is always the same: how many spaces do you need today, and how many will you need if you grow by 30% within 3 years? The answer often rules out some locations from the outset - and it is better to know this before negotiations than in the middle of them.
What this means for tenants
Before you start analysing buildings, it is worth establishing three things - ideally even before your first contact with landlords:
- How many spaces you actually need. Not “how many we would have in an ideal world”, but how many follow from the team's actual working model (office-based, hybrid, how many people commute by car).
- Whether the building offers flexible solutions if the fixed ratio is not enough - rotation, an app, an additional allocation from an operator.
- Whether additional spaces can be negotiated at all, and at what stage of the process, because the later you ask, the less room for manoeuvre you have.
You may find that a building which is ideal in terms of rent and location falls at precisely this hurdle. It is better to know this at the start of the process than halfway through negotiations.
Key takeaway
Parking is an entry criterion, not a negotiation add-on. Defining your parking needs precisely at the very start of the process lets you focus straight away on the buildings that can genuinely meet them, whether through fixed allocation or a flexible management model.
For us, however, the parking ratio itself is a starting point for analysis rather than the sole decision criterion. Beyond the number of spaces in the building itself, we also check the availability of car parks in the immediate vicinity and what external operators can offer. Thanks to this broader view, even a location with a limited number of spaces in the building can turn out to be the optimal solution for the tenant.
Is parking keeping you up at night? Get in touch
I will check how many spaces your location can realistically support and what can be negotiated. No obligation.