The owner of two inner-city parking stations says work-from-home has slashed customer demand and Newcastle council should think twice before rebuilding the Mall car park it demolished in 2021.
Darren Nicholson said his multi-storey car parks in King Street and Bolton Street were struggling to attract customers on Mondays and Fridays due to recent changes in people's work habits.
"Car parking on a Monday and Friday, I may as well be shut. It's a waste of time," he said.
"The vast majority of people are working from home."
City of Newcastle promised three years ago to replace the 380 public spaces in the Mall parking station, but the site remains vacant and plans to incorporate the land and the lost parking into the surrounding Iris Capital redevelopment have collapsed.
Mr Nicholson said a new car park would cost ratepayers "a minimum $20 million".
"If people are running numbers on building car parks, Monday and Fridays are terrible, and Saturdays and Sundays are always a waste," he said.
"They're bloody expensive to build for three out of seven days. The numbers don't go close."
Mr Nicholson's 500-space King Street parking garage was less than half full at lunchtime on Wednesday, the day DOMA Group closed its 678-space Store parking garage in Newcastle West.
"Today is the first day of that car park being shut and we're still nowhere near being full," he said.
"It's not as bad at Bolton Street, but it probably was four months ago.
"It's crept up a little bit, but I don't see them creeping back to where it used to be."
The King Street car park offers all-day parking for $13.
Mr Nicholson redeveloped the King Street site in recent years to add 50 serviced apartments, office space, a childcare centre and gym while retaining all 500 parking spots.
He said the parking spaces had become "ancillary" to the other businesses.
He said he would knock down the 570-space Bolton Street car park and "go straight commercial" if the council rebuilt the nearby Mall parking station.
"That's the best commercial outcome for us," he said.
Mr Nicholson said the newly glass-fronted King Street site was now difficult for some people to recognise as a car park.
"When you drove into town you could see the ugly car park," he said.
"When we had scaffolding up building all the apartments, it was still quite busy.
"When we pulled the scaffolding down we ended up having to put blue parking signs out the front because we were getting a fair bit of abuse from people that we'd knocked the car park down.
"I was always keen to hide it, but maybe I hid it a bit too well."
He said he had been reading complaints about the lack of parking in the Newcastle Herald but believed the community could be more flexible about where they parked.
"In terms of the magic bullet for Newcastle, it's not there and never will be," he said.
"You can't go and put 50 car parks every 100 metres, and that's what all us Newcastle people expect: 'If you can't park out front, clearly there's not enough car parks.'
"It's just a point that it's not quite all doom and gloom."
