Real Estate Meets Rig Havens: Challenges, Solutions, and Future Trends

🚛🎧Insights on the industry’s key challenges and future opportunities. First-hand take with ThinkFreight.

Author

Carla Moyo
February 21, 2025

February 19th, 2025

Welcome to Rig Hut - Striving to be the pinnacle of industrial commercial parking solutions.

Today’s market insights reveal that demand is heavily influenced by location, facility quality, and essential features like access control and lighting. With a primary focus on long-term parking solutions, the industry is shifting towards smarter, more efficient management strategies. By equipping landlords with the right tools and advocating for sustainable parking models, the goal is to make truck parking both more accessible and profitable in the years to come.

Rethinking Truck Parking:

  • Understanding Market Challenges: Recognize supply constraints and significant price disparities among similar truck parking facilities.

  • Developing Innovative Solutions: On-site research, collaboration with landlords and truck operators to streamline operations, and implement technology to automate inventory tracking, payment processing, reporting, and tenant management.

  • Shaping the Future of Truck Parking: Identify key market trends, including the preference for paved lots, the need for advanced access control, and the importance of proper lighting. Rig Hut evolves from hands-on truck parking management to a scalable software platform, streamlining operations for multi-facility operators.

 Thomas Werdine, founder and host of the ThinkFreight Podcast, a show exploring various niches within the freight industry, discusses major stories and market trends with Jake Guso, Co-Founder & CEO of Rig Hut. Dive into the growing challenge of truck parking and how Rig Hut is helping solve it.🚛🎧📍

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Transcript

Miami Dade County passed an ordinance a few years ago where we have this imaginary line in Dade County that says you can build inside this line but not outside this line it's the only, they took a couple of thousand acres right off two major highways in the northwest portion of the county and the southeast portion of the county and they said this is outside the imaginary line you can't do anything out here except agriculture or truck parking, so they just activated a lot of this land that was kind of underutilized and you could pave it over, put in the proper drainage, lights, all that stuff. We were able to add a tremendous amount of parking spaces in an area, you could still buy land at an affordable enough price, where you could make those improvements.

Welcome back to the ThinkFreight podcast, I'm your host Thomas Werdine, I'm excited to have Jake Guso, he's the co-founder and CEO  at Rig Hut. Jake welcome to the Pod, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me Thomas, excited to be here.

Yeah of course, of course, you guys are doing some interesting things with truck parking it's a massive issue within the industry, you know I've had Truck Parking Club on in the past and I'm interested in learning more about Rig Hut. You know—to see what you guys are doing and how you guys are also trying to kind of help and solve this massive issue we have with truck parking, so why don't we dive right into your background, who you are, how old you are and kind of what led you to get kind of involved with truck parking in the industry?

Sure—excuse me, so I'll try to keep this as brief as possible the original lens from which we viewed the Truck Parking Challenge is from a real estate operator's perspective, that's kind of where I spent the majority of my career so the original vision was—"Hey, we're going to add more Supply". That was how we thought we were going to make an impact on the problem we were going to buy, build, and operate truck parking facilities. The short version of the story is the first thing we did was spin up a management company where we actually operated facilities on behalf of third parties and really learned the business from a first-person perspective you know, boots-on-the-ground fashion, and as we started growing that business we were looking for technology that was going to help us scale the management business, and then we could eventually implement that into our real estate business and it simply did not exist at the time so yeah we started building it out step by step now.

That's really interesting, so with your background in real estate what kind of real estate deals were you typically involved in and how long were you doing that kind of transactions before you kind of got involved in the truck parking space?

The real estate business surprisingly did not have much to do with industrial, it was really retail and office properties down here in South Florida, we did some stuff in the midwest as well, although I can't remember the name of the person that led us on to the truck parking. Kind of a challenge and opportunity, but it was some colleagues in the real estate business. The first thing, first site that we researched to kind of our detriment which I can get into later was a site named Miami Truck Parking, I bring this up almost every time I talk about our story. So it's the best-located site in South Florida it is—has the highest quality of amenities it's a beautiful site; landscaping, they've got food trucks, they've got domino tables, card tables, showers—you know—truck repair, the whole kit and caboodle—yeah, so we walked into that facility and we started talking to the security guy and asking about rates and occupancy and at the time it was at $750 a month and $30 a day, and he was 100% occupied with a waitlist. So, that was kind of the initial light bulb and this was you know 2021 or 2020ish, like this was still pandemic era, so that was the light bulb when we were like— "What's going on here?

Now, do you know how many spots?—I  just pulled up Miami Truck Parking, it looks like a beautiful facility, it's—you know like you said—it was 30, it was $30 a day back then, it's now gone up to $38 a day, it's a fully gated community, 24/7 access. How many spots do you think are there? Looks like a couple, you know—looks like they have a good amount of spots a couple maybe; 100 plus?

Don't quote me, but it's around 300.

Oh, wow! So yeah this is huge, I mean, I can just see there's just like one kind of aerial shot and it looks like there's like—a 100 plus trucks here but yeah there's probably behind that to the side there's probably a lot more and um it looks like a really cool facility. So, I'm assuming if you guys this light bulb, is kind of going off with you guys, you're seeing this big facility maybe 300+ trucks/200+ trucks and you're saying—"Wow! Like, he's got you know; he's paying, getting 300 bucks a day or $30 a day, $750 a month and he's got a waitlist for people that want to park here". What was kind of your next steps, when you guys—kind of you know—you said that the white ball went off? What were kind of those next steps you guys are like—"Okay, what are we going to do next? to kind of um dip our toes into this more".

So we did some more research, we were already aware of the supply constraint and that statistic that always gets thrown around that there are 11 drivers per parking space, but that specific site kind of gave us you know an early hint of the gravity of the problem and then we started looking at other sites and we were like—"okay, this guy is at 750 a month he's—you know—like I said super high-quality site. We started looking at some other sites and they were charging; in the same county, right? We're talking like two or three miles away, similar quality not as highly amenitized but they were you know between 400 and 500, say for the sake of simplicity. So now we were like—"Okay, how is there so much disparity in pricing when there's not that much of a difference in the quality or the location? Why wouldn't someone want to save three hundred bucks a month to go two or three miles west? " You still got highway access, so that's kind of when we started peeling back the onion and basically what we ended up doing in terms of actual work was that we knocked on everybody's trailer door, the security guy's door—and our pitch was basically "hey, let us make your life a little bit easier with your manual processes in the yard which at the time what we were solving was service—"So, are you having trouble keeping track of your inventory? Okay, we'll take care of that for you"—At the time we were using an "Empire of Google Sheets", is what I called it—"Are you having trouble with payments? Are you having trouble with reporting? Are you having trouble keeping up with any past-due tenants by any chance? We would kind of solve those problems with service and then we built the tech to automate all those processes.

Interesting, yeah! So, you guys kind of were already in it and then we're very easily able to just kind of sway these owners like—"Hey, we can kind of help you solve a few issues here and make things run more efficiently, see where you might be leaving some money on the table is that that kind of correct?

Other than the "it was easy" comment, we got thrown out of so many yards—you know, like—"I don't know, you get out of here".

For sure and you know that's an interesting thing because that's very—you coming from the real estate side and not really the freight side, that's very common in the freight industry if you don't have a relationship with them right off the bat; I mean they'll just kick rocks and they're not going to be nice about it, the freight people and not to say freight people aren't nice but like just truck drivers can be a little bit rougher around the edges if they don't know you and they have a kind of a distaste for some of the people that they think—Hey! You know—they may look at you, Jake as kind of like how they look at me as a freight broker in my past or they look at you and say—"Hey! Well, this guy is just coming in and gonna take a cut of my money"—like we don't need that, so what was kind of maybe that proposition to them, to get them to say; "this is for a benefit not to your detriment".

Yeah, so I'll preface it with what I told you earlier that our direct customer is the landlord or the parking operator, we try to provide an exceptional degree of service to our customers, and ancillary to that we have a lot of interaction with drivers and we try to provide an exceptional level of service to them as well, the direct answer to your question and how I think we're having an impact on this problem is we're giving landlords tools to make their facilities more efficient and more profitable. I know there's an argument as to whether parking should be paid or free, right? I think it needs to be paid if we want to have a solution to the problem within this decade or the next 20 years because it'll take free parking a really long time to implement and the more we can show landlords and investors that this is worth pursuing, the more spaces they're going to build.

Right, right now—when you guys maybe started or even today—you aren't directly operating any spaces, is that correct?

That's correct.

You guys have no spaces yourself and you guys are essentially just acting as the platform for the landowners to manage, rent them out, and be more efficient?

Correct, we want to be the company that kind of operates in the background.

Yeah, no—for sure! So, how many locations do you guys currently manage and what's the total number of truck parking spaces available through Rig Hut?

So, we've got—I haven't checked in a couple of weeks, but last I checked it was somewhere over 150 yards.

Okay

Now, some of those come from our kind of original tech platform, so they're a little bit smaller yards right now Rig Hut's core customer like what we call our ICP, our ideal customer is either; a portfolio operator, so they operate more than one facility or they operate one large facility meaning over 50-60 spaces. So we've got for example one yard in Philly that's 100 acres and represents over a thousand parking spaces, which makes a big dent in space count, if I had to guess the total number of spaces we are well into—we might be over 10,000, if I had to guess, but there are some big yards in there.

No, that's fantastic, you touched on something I was just going to ask next. Where was—how many of those are just in Florida and how many do you have across the US?

I don't have a breakdown offhand, but we're in many different states, the highest in Florida...

You guys are scaling into into other states as well?

Yes, it's getting easier to find them.

Yeah, for sure and I think people are becoming more like the real estate landowners, they are also becoming more savvy to kind of this issue they've kind of seen more on your local news, they've seen more of the bands going on—they've seen more of this truck parking going up, you're seeing more commercial real estate go up for—I see a lot of in my community, a lot of travel stops for trucks with truck parking and so you're seeing a lot there. Tenants are seeing a lot more of it and these landowners are seeing a lot more of it. I mean I've had people in my family who have real estate who have been like—"Hey! like how can I make money off my real estate?—I was just like—"We just kind of have to do these small things" and you could very easily turn what you have into truck parking, but you're also pretty far off of the beaten path, like some   some people I know are way out in the boonies and they could probably have found a few local trucking companies that would want to do it. Still, they're not close to any highways, they have no real amenities, they'd have to spend a lot and do things, so you know, it just becomes people trying to—like I said people are becoming more aware of the issues so like you said it's becoming a little bit easier to find some of those spots.

Correct .

What are some determining factors when you guys are looking to expand or some of the States you guys are maybe prioritizing? Are there specific regions with more of an urgent demand that you guys are focusing on?

We're kind of agnostic as to region, right? We want to go where the facilities are currently, and then it just so happens that we end up in major freight markets, I'd say our highest densities right now are in South Florida, Atlanta, Port Newark, Dallas, and Fort Worth, we're starting to get some stuff out in Phoenix and Chicago, but we're kind of agnostic, the good thing about our business is we're not geographically constrained; it's a zoom call it a demo.

That's fantastic—I guess for some of the freight brokers and the truck drivers who are listening out there. How can they know that when they send a driver or they send one of their trucks into Rig Hut facility that they know that it's going to be secure, that it's going to have you know what they're looking for in terms of amenities or like secure parking you know with theft being one of the hot topics in the industry right now? How can they be secure or know that their vehicles and their freight will be secure?

So they're going to have clear visibility into the level of amenities, if they find a facility that's powered by Rig Hut. As part of the onboard process, we're very clear on the description of amenities, we make summaries; whether or not it is gated, whether or not they've got access control: is it unique codes is it a master code—you know—is it lit, do we have cameras, do we have security; if its security is remote, is it on-site. So anyone that goes on the site and finds a yard or if they're directed by a landlord or a parking manager to a facility that uses Rig Hut as its back end they'll have super clear visibility into the level of security and the level of amenities at that facility.

What are some of the typical or like um more of the—I guess wanted amenities that you guys are seeing that most?—facilities have now—is it lighting, cameras, bathroom facilities? What are some of those typical must-haves when you're looking or is it just kind of are some of these sites just you know Plane-Jane just parking?

Yeah, I think that's market-dependent, right? If you've got a ton of demand and not a lot of Supply, landlords sometimes can get away with less improvements. I'd say the biggest immediate differentiator that we see just when we track demand like sometimes we have a portfolio you know some of the portfolio operators'll have one site nearby that's some sort of aggregate surface; like a gravel surface or millings or something and then they've got another one that's asphalt and or concrete, and it's clearly marked and delineated, their space numbers. All else being equal that asphalt yard is going to get full first and then they'll move back onto the the aggregate surface. I'd say access control has become very important, historically if a landlord or an operator has any form of access control, typically they've been giving out master codes, so we're working on a product that we'll launch in a couple of days that will provide unique access credentials to each driver and have access logs so they can keep track of who's coming in and out. Obviously, the facility needs to be lit, no one wants to be parking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in a dark yard, those are kind of the basics. So I'll say this as well, most Rig Hut customers currently offer what we call long-term parking, which is typically monthly, it's not so much the over-the-road driver. Typically—a lot of our facilities do take daily reservations but that's not what they're optimizing for so there's not as much of a need for that kind of hotel-guest style amenity list; like bathrooms, typically not required if it's monthly parking we're just dropping the truck, getting in the car going home, no food, no diesel, things like that.

No, no—that makes sense so a lot is more targeted at specifically long-term parking as opposed to OTR which we still do offer but it's more geared toward longer-term,

Right, typically.

Yeah, no— that makes sense—doesn't matter whether it's long-term parking or OTR parking, parking is an issue and something that's interesting and I mentioned earlier it's just some of these communities are just all outright banning truck parking so it's becoming a lot more of that issue, like "Hey! when I'm home where do I park my truck in my area?" Used to be a lot more truck-friendly, where they were allowing trucks to park on the side of the road or right in front of their house and now they've completely disallowed that, even if it's just a bobtail without a trailer, so it's just it's becoming more of a headache just live life outside of the truck, as well, so it's good to see that there are lots of options coming out there—whether it's OTR drivers, but also for the long term as well because I  think that you know everyone needs parking. If the stat that goes around; one spot for every 11 drivers—not sure how accurate that is in 2024, we've added a lot of truck parking.

That statistic always gets thrown around, I think since the beginning anyone who's really researched the issue will probably say that the statistic is off. They're hard to find, that's one of the challenges that we had when we first started building Rig Hut, we were just saying sometimes the only way that we could find a yard was if we drove by it or if we happened to go on Google Street View, we saw a phone number—I think it's worse in some places for example where we are Miami, I would venture to say there are more than 11 drivers you know running routes down here per parking space, Port Newark definitely, then you get into some areas like—I won't call anybody out but you get into some areas where maybe there is an equilibrium already, right?

Yeah, you're spot on, because there's such a high density of trucks and there's such a high density of people, and there's really nowhere in—like you said, Miami, there's just such limited space for—traffic, is already crazy as it is and it's like: "okay, you add on, taking away something". What do you take away to add truck parking in Miami?

Miami actually has a really interesting story about that so—

Love to hear it!

Obviously, Miami is geographically land-constrained, we have water on both sides, and most municipalities—Miami-Dade County and the municipalities within Miami-Dade County typically do not want higher intensive industrial uses, and truck parking is one of those uses. They don't want it, they don't want to approve it, and you're almost never going to get a property rezoned through anything that requires a public—

Is not sexy, it's not sexy to them.

I don't know who drove this but Miami Dade County passed an ordinance a few years ago where we have this imaginary line in the county that says "You can build inside this line, but not outside this line, outside this line it's agricultural only", they took a couple of thousand acres off two major highways in the northwest portion of the county and the southeast portion of the county and they said—"This is outside the imaginary line you can't do anything out here except agriculture or truck parking" so they just activated a lot of this land that was kind of underutilized and you could pave it over, put in the proper drainage, lights, all that stuff but we were able to add a tremendous amount of parking spaces in an area, where you could still buy land at an affordable enough price where you  could make those improvements and those are the most affordable parking rates in Dade County now.

Why do you think more municipalities aren't taking that kind of approach?

Well, it is the government so not not not many things, so not many things make sense, but all else being equal if you're a municipality and you have a vacant piece of land and you could build an apartment build building and help with the housing problem, you could build retail, and provide some more amenities and entertainment to the residents that already live in your municipality, you could even build an office building if you wanted to draw some traffic outside of the downtown areas and into here into whatever the suburb is—anything industrial is very low on the totem pole because if they're talking to the constituency or their residents, what's the pitch for building truck parking to the residents or for building a million square foot distribution center? It just gets a lot of push back but everybody wants their package delivered on the same day.

You stole the word, you took the words right out of my mouth, you must have seen my mouth opening for that one because I was just about to say yeah I mean you can tell people—"Hey, if you want your package in one day we need truck parking. It's very interesting, I've always thought about the dynamic between the customer not realizing how their products get there one day, and to their doorstep in one day and then saying "Ew, industrial trucks we don't want them near our houses, they're loud—crime issues". I mean it's very interesting and I think it's a very delicate balance and I think more communities should take an approach to what Miami-Dade did and look at—"Hey, where do we have some underutilized space that maybe is even in more of the industrial area? Hey, let's build truck parking here because it's something that is needed". We can overall serve the community in a different way.

For sure another thing that's been done in Florida if anyone listening to this wants some ideas on how to add parking, we've seen guys activate pieces of property that sit under the overhead transmission lines. So if a property is sitting under the T-lines, here they run pretty much up and down 995 from Key West-to-Jacksonville or Miami-to-Jacksonville 95, under the line you can't do anything, they're—I don't know 30 feet over your head, you're not going to build a building, so some guys have convinced the Florida utility company FPL to let them lease or operate on a ref share, I'm not exactly sure how it works from an operational perspective but they're parking trucks under the transmission lines. It's limited you can't do hazmat, you can't stack containers, you can basically only park driven reefers, flatbeds, and that kind of things, but it's a piece of land that you otherwise can't do anything with.

Now is that kind of land being more utilized for the OTR drivers who are just kind of coming in and out or is that being more utilized for the long-term stuff as well?

I'd say both.

That's interesting.

Both yeah, it's generally Highway accessibility.

Yeah, no, that's interesting, it makes sense, obviously, no hazmat loads because obviously, we don't want any damage to the power stuff for the whole state, for god knows how long. So I want to ask you—I know you guys are doing a lot with operators. Are you guys teaming up with any truck stops that are already doing truck parking, any rest areas, or anything like that to kind of give some of those OTRs? I know you guys are more focused on the long term but do have any potential for the OTR side as well to get more involved in that?

For sure, specifically, the truck stop route right—the reason we focused on monthly is that's simply just the way the cookie kind of crumbled, that's where we were getting a lot of activity but we see a huge opportunity to add a lot of value to the truck stop operators.

Yeah, no for sure, you kind of take where the business takes you, and then you kind of expand from there as you see the demand and the opportunities, and definitely, there are a lot of opportunities in the OTR space, so yeah obviously collaborating with truck stops and other places in the future—I guess—let me ask you—So where do you kind of foresee—we were kind of talking off camera a little bit about truck—you know the truck parking club, I'm sorry, Texas Truck Show—geez—Texas Trucking Show. I went to a couple of years ago and there were no parking operators there and last year or earlier this year when I went there were, I believe five or six different, from both the operator perspective and then the marketplace perspective, so I mean what kind of trends do you foresee over the next maybe two or three years and do you anticipate there being any shifts in some of that demand or the supply for truck parking?

I think there's going to be a shift in supply for sure, yeah there's we're starting to see early consolidation of operators. So if you look at what we call the managed truck parking market now is super fragmented, with a lot of Mom and Pop style operators, difficult to find, limited systems, and limited online visibility, we're starting to see some institutional-esque players enter the space with big money behind them to build brands of truck parking and we're starting to see some of the regional operators, something that was just announced last week at a conference we were at Realize Truck Parking an operator and StoreMyTruck; the oldest operator in the country and the largest operator in the country merged so they're going to be up to—I don't know, I think they're over a hundred facilities or 80 facilities, they'll be the largest in the country by far. I think that's going to keep happening, I think it's going to go from many small operators to probably a few larger operators, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, it's kind of got to play out. I think the larger companies are going to be able to drive efficiencies and provide a more efficient product out into the market.

I think that—I think there's going to be a lot of consolidation whether that's—I just think there's going be a lot of consolidation on that end I think like you said we're already starting to see it and you know kind of like anything in this industry as kind of that need develops, we see kind of the infrastructure being built out here, the big companies then come in and say—"Hey! Let's buy this so that we don't have to build this infrastructure out, we can just implement and then start utilizing the best of our abilities". Before we wrap, where do you— I know you guys have some things coming out here in the future. Is there anything maybe you can kind of tell us—"This will come out in a couple of weeks here"? So is there anything you can maybe tell us ahead of time that you guys are excited about with maybe some of the new releases or kind of how you guys are evolving over the next year or so?

We've got a lot of things on the road map, right? I'll give the one that we're launching this week which is our Access Control integration, so we're going to be able to track reservations, and which active customers are going in and out of the facility, it will allow some landlords to replace some of their high capex hardware costs. So this product will kind of replace a kiosk if someone's using a kiosk, with a ticketing system or something like that it'll provide landlords with access logs, time-stamps, the in and the out, and that will allow us to tie into some other cool things that we'll release in the future, but that's the big one that we're launching now.

No, that's cool cuz that ties into you know Pro-fraud prevention, it ties into keeping your yard safe, it ties into keeping the driver safe so that's really cool, it's really cool that you guys are working to implement you know that kind of technology that broader technology.

And drivers won't have to get out of the truck anymore.

And drivers won't have to get out of the truck anymore. Hey! That's the best part, right? It makes it easier for the driver. Jake—I really appreciate you coming on and talking truck parking, talking about what you guys are building over there in Miami. If the audience wants to get involved, they want to get in touch, they want to learn a little bit more about how can they find you guys online.

Check out our website it's therighut.com, look us up on Twitter at Rig Hut Truck Parking or shoot us an email. We're always available, me and Jose—our contact info is everywhere feel free to call us.

Awesome make sure you guys check out Jake and Jose at Rig Hut, I'll have all their links in the comments or the show notes, if you like today's podcast please give it a like and review, it does help us out a ton and don't forget we do drop three weekly newsletters at ThinkFreight. And we'll catch you guys in the next episode.

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