Proptech Companies FLASH and Cohesion Strike Co-Selling Partnership
Both hope that companies already using smart-building technology will expand to include parking control.
Proptech companies FLASH, which offers computerized control of parking facilities, and Cohesion, with its smart building systems, have embarked on a co-selling partnership.
“The partnership will open up CRE opportunities for each company and will accelerate the connected experience between parking assets and intelligent buildings within Cohesion’s global CRE portfolio,” the companies say in a press release. More simply, Cohesion will add FLASH to its set of integrations to third-party capabilities. That will permit sales of the parking services as add-ons.
“Similar cloud-backed platform architecture allowed for easy integration of FLASH’s parking access and revenue control solution (PARCS) and digital tools into Cohesion’s smart building platform,” the release says. “With the integration, Cohesion offers customers an eParking reservation experience that allows tenants and guests of the building to seamlessly reserve, purchase, and access parking. Future integrated parking features will include digitally managing monthly parking and EV charging reservations and payments.”
The approach is a classic type that’s been seen in high tech for decades. Similar in a way to Blue Whale EV signing on as a reseller of SemaConnect equipment, this is another example of how the technology portion of CRE is maturing and expanding.
The concept is that no one vendor other than the few behemoths in an industry will likely be able to develop products to cover everything clients might need. There are three ways out of the situation. One is to focus on a given area of expertise and not to try expansion. Another is to buy products or companies and integrated them into what you do. Third, partners with other companies.
Such partnerships tend to be between one company that has a more fundamental product or suit of products that provide much of what customers need, and a second company with a specific part the former is missing.
In this case, each has a broad set of capabilities. But it does seem that a company managing smart business technology, with data analysis, digital operations, and tenant experience, is more likely to have a road to add sales of parking systems than a parking system vendor is to sell full smart building treatments.
FLASH says that its technology is in place at more than 16,000 customer locations in major US cities and Canada, while Cohesion’s clients own and operate 18.5 billion square feet of commercial buildings.