ALPEN SOLVES RENTER'S BICYCLE STORAGE DILEMMA

The New York Times recently highlighted an increasingly common pain point for apartment dwellers of where to store bicycles. Global bike sales are soaring, as people ditch public transportation for socially distanced alternatives, and tenants are looking for better ways to store their bikes. Traditional bike racks and shared bike rooms aren’t realistic for today’s bikes, particularly e-bikes, that cost thousands of dollars. Tenants are demanding upgraded security and convenience without sacrificing valuable apartment space.

ALPEN offers landlord's a high-tech, cash-flowing solution to this burgeoning demand, with zero upfront capital investment. Your tenants will appreciate the peace of mind, convenience and extra space in their apartment units.

A New York Biker’s Headache: Where To Store It

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/realestate/new-york-bike-storage-headache

With New Yorkers avoiding the subway and buses, landlords and building managers grapple with the expanding need for bike storage space.

The long bike rides that Carolann Martini takes from her Murray Hill co-op down to Battery Park are invigorating. Dragging her bike out of the storage room? Not so much.

The tight space is a maze of long-forgotten bikes and trikes tethered to elementary school-style racks. To retrieve her Eduardo Bianchi road bike, she has to untangle it from a web of handlebars, pedals and frames. “It’s just aggravation,” said Ms. Martini, a hospitality industry executive. Cycling in the city “is a pleasure. So why should I be aggravated?”

The pandemic has ushered in a golden age of cycling for New Yorkers who, like Ms. Martini, have discovered that riding a bike everyday is fun, and less confined than a trip on the bus or subway. But with daily biking comes a hitch that seasoned riders already knew about: storing a bike in the city is a grind.

New Yorkers lucky enough to live in buildings with basement storage often contend with cluttered, inconvenient subterranean spaces. Everyone else is left squeezing a large, cumbersome object into an elevator or hoofing it up flights of stairs. Get it into the apartment, and now it needs a place to go — and that usually means the ceiling, a wall, a closet, or, according to a few creative cyclists, in a bathtub (just remove it before you bathe, obviously).

Leave a bike locked on the street and you might as well consider it a charitable donation — thefts of bikes worth $1,000 or more were up 65 percent in June, and 64 percent in the first two weeks of July, from the same time periods in 2019, according to the New York Police Department.

“The main reason that people don’t bike is because of safety and the second reason that they state is where to actually put their bike,” said Danny Harris, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a bike advocacy organization.

But with ridership up, some building owners are looking for ways to accommodate tenants who have been asking for better storage options. Bike rooms, long treated as an afterthought, are receiving newfound attention. This is especially true in full-service buildings where more desirable perks like gyms and children’s playrooms have been shut down indefinitely. Management may not be able to offer a golf simulator for the foreseeable future, but with a modest investment, it could spruce up the bike room.

The interest in bike storage is spreading into the real estate market too, according to brokers who say more clients are inquiring about storage, with some now considering it a must-have amenity. Henry Mullin, a salesman with Douglas Elliman, started giving out Citi Bike memberships as move-in gifts after clients started asking to tour storage rooms.

“The bike storage situation is exploding. Nobody knows what to do,” said Jacky Teplitzky, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman who drove to a Walmart in South Carolina in June to find a bike, waiting outside when the store opened to get a cruiser for herself and bring it back to the city. “Everyone is talking to the managing agent, the building, they are negotiating with the neighbors to hang two bikes with one rack.”