Every day, Bronte Hunter drove from a farm outside Canberra into Barton for work, and she handed over $16 just to leave her car somewhere.

With no public transport option, driving wasn’t really a choice. And for someone fresh out of university, the daily parking bill hurt.

Then she noticed something frustrating. The building where she worked had a large basement full of allocated parking spaces – and, by her estimate, it was regularly only about half full.

Some workers were paying around $8 a day to retain spaces they weren’t using, while Bronte was paying twice as much to park down the road.

“I was like, I would love to be able to use the parks in the building, so people that are paying for it and not using it … can get it back. And I can pay half price!” she said.

That frustration became Parko Services, a Canberra-built website that works a little like Airbnb for parking – connecting people who have an empty car space with people looking for somewhere cheaper and more convenient to park.

The concept is particularly suited to a city where many people still drive to work, but changing work patterns mean thousands of privately allocated spaces may not be used every day.

A public servant working from home two days a week could potentially rent their workplace space on those days. Someone living in an apartment in Civic or Woden could make their space available while they are at work. A resident going away for a fortnight could list theirs temporarily.

“How do we leverage this empty space so that people can have cheaper car parking, and the people who have the car parking have it as an income stream?” Bronte said.

And Canberrans appear interested.

Since launching in mid-May, Parko has attracted more than 5000 visits to its website, including almost 3000 in the previous 30 days. It has more than 20 hosts and 57 registered users, with spaces appearing around Civic, Woden, Barton, Manuka and Harrison near the light rail line.

Hosts decide when their space is available and set the price.

So far, Bronte said daily spaces are generally being offered for about $10, weekly spaces for $40 to $50 and monthly parking for around $150 to $200, depending on location.

The potential savings can be substantial.

Bronte points to Civic, where she said parking at the Canberra Olympic Pool costs $23 a day – $115 over a five-day working week. Parko hosts nearby are offering spaces for about $50 a week.

Some daily spaces are around $10, compared with early-bird commercial parking of about $20.

For Bronte, however, the longer-term opportunity is not simply cheaper parking. It is about making better use of parking Canberra has already built.

Hybrid working has changed the equation. Allocated office spaces can sit empty when employees work from home, while growing apartment precincts contain private spaces that may be unused for much of the day.

Parko is designed to allow those spaces to move in and out of the parking supply rather than requiring someone to rent them permanently.

Bronte first began developing the idea in 2024. When developers quoted around $60,000 to build the platform, she decided to teach herself how to do it.

“I could see the demand for it,” she said.

“Every person that I spoke to either would have been keen to use it, or keen to list a car space through it.”

“I decided I’d give it a try and learn how to build it myself.”

One of the bigger challenges will be getting Canberra’s apartment and commercial buildings involved.

Strata rules and building security can make sharing private parking more complicated, so Bronte has built a “communities” function that allows access to be restricted to particular residents or employees.

A building manager can approve users and see who is accessing its parking, while a workplace could restrict bookings to people with its company email address.

Bronte has begun speaking with strata companies and building managers and hopes eventually to approach property managers responsible for larger government buildings.

That could determine how far the idea ultimately goes.

Rather than creating more parking in areas where it is expensive or difficult to find, Parko’s proposition is that at least part of the answer could be hidden behind apartment gates and underneath office buildings – spaces that already exist but aren’t being used.

Bronte is still running Parko alongside another job and has delivered more than 12,000 flyers around Canberra herself, often spending evenings and weekends walking through areas where she thinks the concept could work.

Her goal is eventually to make the business her full-time job.

But her bigger ambition is for Parko to become something Canberrans automatically check before paying commercial parking rates.

“I would love it to become synonymous with Canberra parking,” she said.

To download Parko, scan the QR code.

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