Parking Lot Maintenance 101: A Beginner’s Guide

I’d venture a guess that until you became a property manager, you didn’t spend much time thinking about parking lot maintenance. But even if it wasn’t on your mind as your head hit the pillow, you’re probably familiar with the sensation of your brain being rattled in your skull when you hit a pothole on the road. While you’ll be dealing mostly with parking lots rather than roads, they share the same problems. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then parking lot maintenance services (also called pavement maintenance) are the cheaper and easier prevention to paving’s expensive and time-consuming cure. 

The 4 Types of Parking Lot Maintenance 

There are four basic types of parking lot maintenance that can be used to lengthen the life of asphalt pavement and ensure a parking lot remains functional: crack sealing, sealcoating, striping, and patching/repairs. These four can be used on their own or together to preserve the parking lot’s integrity, increase its lifespan, and maximize the long-term ROI of your parking lot investment. In other words, think of these as a quartet of anti-aging products designed to delay the inevitable wrinkles of time.

First up: crack seal

Crack Sealing

‍Sometimes called crackfill, cracksealing, or simply rubber. This is what you are looking at when you see black squiggly lines all around an asphalt parking lot. (Please take no insult to your intelligence; I told you this was a beginner’s guide!) The primary function of crack sealing a parking lot is to prevent moisture from sinking into the subgrade (subgrade = a thick layer of gravel that is under the asphalt) and eroding the sturdy foundation that the asphalt was built on. If not sealed regularly, cracks will grow and often lead to potholes, so having this maintenance service done regularly will help avoid frequent liability issues.

(See Parking Lot Maintenance 101: Crack Sealing for a more in depth look at this service.)

Sealcoating

Sometimes mistakenly called “overlaying” (an overlay is a very different thing in the asphalt world that involves installing a new layer of asphalt.) Sealcoating is a thin black liquid (think the consistency of paint) that is usually sprayed over the entire surface of a parking lot. While crack sealing’s primary purpose is preventing future damage to the base, sealcoating’s purpose is (if reapplied every 2-3 years) to help extend the life of the asphalt parking lot’s surface. Regular parking lot sealcoating helps to prevent the asphalt from becoming brittle which can help delay surface wear and cracking. Sealcoating also refreshes the look of a parking lot by evening out the look of the irregularities caused by cracking or patching. Think of it as a liquid foundation for your parking lot’s complexion!

Important Tip: Although sealer is applied to the entire asphalt parking lot’s surface, it is not a substitute for crack sealing. Crack sealing must be used in conjunction with sealcoating to get the water protecting and sealed surface benefits of rubber used over the cracks.

(Visit our Sealcoating page to learn more.) 

Line Striping

‍Hopefully the most obvious of the four types of maintenance services (unless you try to add an extra “p.” Please, don’t do that!) Striping is the process by which the team paints the parking stall lines, any stencils for handicap parking, crosswalks, no parking zones, arrows for drive lanes, and any other lines or stencils needed.  If you want to keep a parking lot functioning at its bare minimum, striping is probably the most nonnegotiable and frequent service needed. You may lose a little faith in humanity if you ever notice how people try to park in a parking lot without lines…it’s quite something!

Asphalt Patching

‍While we’ve listed this parking lot maintenance service last, if you are doing all of these services, patching would generally be done at the beginning of a preventative maintenance project. Patching (or asphalt repair) is a generic term for the various methods of adding asphalt to localized areas in a parking lot to fix the potholes and badly cracked sections of a parking lot. From an integrity standpoint, where crack sealing targets small streams of water intrusion, asphalt repairs fix the lakes. It won’t take long for a deep pothole to compromise the stability of the exposed base in that area, so prompt attention to holes is key. However, potholes present another problem to a property manager in addition to the structure of the parking lot;  they are an accident  (and corresponding lawsuit) waiting to happen. Just like you will certainly find your child’s one Lego left on the floor and step on it, so too will your tenants and customers find the potholes in your lots and fall into or over them. Protect them and you by tending to these areas quickly.

I sincerely hope that you will not be dreaming about asphalt after reading this post. There are much more exciting things to dream about! But I do hope that you might sleep a little more soundly feeling that you understand your parking lot projects a little bit better. I’m sure that you still have questions though, and we would love to answer them.

Drop us a line or give us a call so we can help get you ready for your next parking lot maintenance project. You’re not alone!