Who Do You Already Know With a Spare Parking Space?

Somewhere within a five minute walk of where you're standing, there's an empty driveway.

It belongs to someone who works from home now. Or someone who gave up their car years ago and never thought twice about the concrete slab out front. It sits empty every weekday while you circle the block for the fourth time, watching your meeting start without you.

Here's the part that should annoy you: there's a reasonable chance you've met them. A neighbour two streets over. A colleague's partner. Someone from the school pickup line. The space was there the whole time. Nobody told you.

Key Takeaways

• Find Friends matches your contacts against Parksy's 136,035 members in 57 countries, so you can see who you already know here.
• Refer someone and you both get $10 USD in credit at signup. No purchase required.
• Contacts are matched by hash, never stored readable, and nothing is sent without you tapping send.

Why does parking still run on who you know?

Because parking isn't a price problem, it's a trust problem. You're leaving a car on private property, and the owner is handing a stranger access to where they live. Both sides take a small leap, and the thing that makes it easy isn't a dollar figure. It's context.

That's the difference between parking and every other marketplace. On most platforms you sort low to high, pick a number and move on. Here, specifically, the cheapest listing from a stranger loses to a fair listing from someone your mate vouches for.

As a result, the best spaces have always moved by word of mouth. A noticeboard in a foyer. A message in a building group chat. Someone mentioning that his sister's place near the station sits empty all week. In fact this has run quietly off platform for decades. It works. It's just invisible and slow.

Find Friends makes it visible, without turning your parking into a public feed.

What does Find Friends actually do?

Find Friends is a private contact matching tool inside Parksy that does three things and nothing else. It checks your address book against Parksy members, shows you the people you already know who are here, and gives you a personal share link you can send to anyone. Specifically, you connect Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo, or you upload a contacts file if you'd rather keep it manual. Matches then appear on your screen, privately, visible to you and to nobody else on the platform. Alongside them you'll see suggestions of people you're likely connected to, and from there you can jump straight to spaces near the suburbs your contacts live in. That, in full, is the feature. It doesn't post anything and it doesn't announce anything to anyone.

Notably, it doesn't change what any other member can see about you, and it never touches your bookings or the addresses of spaces you've listed.

How does the $10 referral credit work?

When someone joins Parksy through your personal link, you both get $10 USD in Parksy credit. Not a discount code with conditions stapled to it, not a prize draw. Credit on both accounts, applied when they sign up. Importantly, they don't have to pay for anything first.

For example, share it with five people and that's $50 in your account, ready to spend against a subscription or a listing. Your link works anywhere: a text, a group chat, a building noticeboard, a work Slack. It also works for people who'd never hand over their contacts, which is most of the reason we built it.

Credit is applied at signup for both the referrer and the new member, and has no cash value. Self-referrals, duplicate accounts and fraudulent signups are void.

What happens to your contacts?

Handing over an address book is one of the biggest asks in any app. Therefore, in plain language, here is exactly what happens. Every line below is a commitment, not a best effort.

Your contacts are never stored in readable form. Each address is converted on our server into a keyed HMAC-SHA-256 hash and the original is discarded before anything is written to disk. What we keep is a scrambled value, which is pseudonymised data under GDPR Article 4: useless to anyone who takes the database without also taking our server key. We keep those hashes so that if someone in your contacts joins later, you find out. Nothing readable about a non-member is retained.

Nothing goes out to anyone you didn't pick. Find Friends never sends an invite by itself. Importing your contacts shows you matches and does nothing else. If you choose to invite someone and they don't respond, we follow up at most twice and then stop permanently, and every message carries one-click unsubscribe. We'll also email you, at most weekly, when someone you know joins, and you can switch that off from any digest.

Nobody sees your address book. Not other members, not the people you matched with. Someone who appears in your results is never told how you found them.

You can delete every imported contact in one click. There's a Delete imported contacts button at the bottom of Find Friends and your referrals page. It clears your imports and resets your social graph: matches and "people you may know" go back to empty. People who already joined through your link keep their accounts and stay credited to you. Deleting your account erases the lot regardless.

Don't want to connect an account? Upload a CSV or VCF file instead. You decide exactly what goes in it, and it never touches a Google restricted scope.

Because some of those contacts belong to people who aren't Parksy members, this is handled as third-party personal information under the Australian Privacy Principles, and the same consent rules we already apply to UK and EU visitors apply here.

What do you actually get out of it?

Different things depending on which side of the driveway you're on.

If you're looking for a space, a listing connected to someone you know is a different proposition to one from a stranger. You can ask a real question and get a real answer. For instance, you find out the gate sticks, or that the walk to the station is genuinely six minutes and not the fifteen the map suggests.

If you're renting out a space, this is the difference between waiting for the right stranger and reaching the people already around you. A driveway rented to a friend of a friend is easier to agree, and far less likely to end badly.

And for everyone, density is the whole game. Parksy works better in a suburb with forty members than one with four. Consequently, every person you bring in makes the map around your own home more useful to you, not just to us.

Parking is a local problem, solved locally, by people who live near each other. That's not a new idea. It's the oldest one there is. We've just given it a search box.

Find your people

Pick whichever costs you the least effort. They all end in the same place.

1. Gmail or Outlook. Two taps, fastest route, most matches.
2. Yahoo. Same flow if that's where your contacts live.
3. CSV or VCF upload. The privacy first option. Nothing leaves your device that you didn't put in the file.
4. Just share your link. No import at all. Send it to three people who complain about parking.

Any of them takes less time than one more lap around the block.

Find friends on Parksy

Frequently asked questions