Parking lots are a part of automotive infrastructure that we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. And yet, they’re crucial, because a great many of our car journeys begin or end in one. It sounds simple enough to paint up a lot, but you might be surprised just how much money is in this line of work.
Colin Patterson makes his living in the maintenance and painting of these lots, and he lays out everything that goes into it. He uploads videos of his work to YouTube, covering everything from home driveway repairs to full layout jobs in commercial parking lots. It’s one of those channels that specializes in satisfying footage of paint and goop being professionally applied just where it’s supposed to go.
Specialist equipment is used to lay down those perfectly straight white lines. Colin’s videos show his fine skills with his nifty wheeled sprayer cart, or “line striper,” and it’s an absolute joy to watch.
The line striper lays down a thick coat of paint in a single pass which perfectly contrasts with the dark asphalt below. The same tool is also used with other colors, like blue for painting disabled spaces, or green for marking out EV charging spots. Colin also recommends a beginner line striper for those new to the business—he calls it a “money-making machine.”
Whatever the color, the traffic marking paint goes on in a thick, single coat. Making single passes keeps a job quick and avoids any ugly mistakes where multiple passes might not line up.
Of course, line marking on city streets is handled by the local department of transport in most jurisdictions. But when it comes to parking lots at malls, sports stadiums, warehouses, or other businesses, it’s a private matter. That’s where operations like Colin’s come in.
Where Colin’s channel gets really interesting, though, is the money. On occasion, Colin likes to go through a job piece by piece, explaining just how much profit there is in a job done well. In a previous life, he worked as a pizza delivery driver. Based on his videos, though, it appears painting parking lots is treating him much better.
He outlines how one job paid $28,000. This covered sealcoating 100,000 square-feet of parking lot (20 cents a sq/ft), sealing 3,000 feet of cracks ($1/ft), and laying 4,000 feet of 4-inch lines (75 cents a foot). It also covered the overall layout and stenciling for a handful of reserved spaces ($2,000).
It sounds like a big job, but Colin and his crew knocked it out in three days. Between materials ($7,328) and labor ($2,688), the job turned up $17,984 in profit. Good work if you can get it.
Colin’s work doesn’t just involve painting lots. Sealcoating driveways is a big part of the business, too, as is filling cracks. It’s all part of delivering functional parking infrastructure to the customer. That’s ultimately what they’re paying for.
A lot of jobs involve working around the customer’s needs, too. Commercial lots are often painted after hours. Big jobs are also often broken up into “phases,” with some of the lot left open while the crew paints the other sections.
Overall, making big money painting lots isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. You need the right equipment, the right skills, and the ability to seek out and execute on well-paying jobs. As Colin demonstrates, though, maintaining the nation’s parking infrastructure can be very rewarding if you know what you’re doing.
Image credits: Colin Patterson via YouTube screenshot
This looks like something that I could do to make a good living, however I fear that I would paint myself into a corner 😉
Most of us probably are in jobs where nobody really notices your work unless it’s done poorly. This is definitely one of those jobs. I love parking lots with good marking. Doesn’t seem a priority for a lot of places.
Anyway, here’s a toast to all of us in fairly invisible but important jobs.
Years ago I had my driveway resealed by the same company that did the parking lots of the industrial facility I worked at. The seal coat company purchased their seal coat from the facility I worked at, so I knew how much they were paying for their bulk product. I asked a seemingly innocent question about how much seal coat my driveway would require and did the quick mental math against the bid they provided me (it was itemized by cost, but didn’t provide quantities except for labor hours). They had a nearly 500% markup on the seal coat, which initially made me upset until I started considering the cost of the equipment they had, the other materials and labors they didn’t invoice me for (Tyvek suits, cleaning out the tanks, etc.) and realized the profit margins probably aren’t as high as I had thought. While line striping probably has higher profit margins, it is also a higher-skill task and helps balance the bottom line for other lower-margin services like patching and sealing.
Yeah, the material cost is definitely only one component of the larger picture. Like you said, equipment, labor, consumable supplies, fuel, etc. etc.
I’m sure you could make a living at just sealcoating if you kept your equipment on the move at all times, but it would be tough. Most people I know who do it count on either doing multiple projects in a day, or having add-ons like crack repair and striping.
Painting lines on the road is harder than it looks I talked to a DOT line painter one time and it’s a complex ballet between the truck driver, the spray head operator and the guy operating the paint tank
A good friend works for a municipality and spent a summer line painting and said the same thing. There is a lot more coordination between the team on the truck than he realized, and at the end of the summer he realized he didn’t have the patience for the work and instead opted to do other tasks like road patching and painting crosswalks (stuff with stencils, basically). I’m not sure what role on the truck he had that summer, but he said the guys who did it as their normal job were almost super-human in their ability to focus on their task while being completely aware of their surroundings.
If I took this job I’d be tempted to paint all the parking spaces BIGGER so actual cars can park in them without dinging each other.
No, they still would park crooked or across two spots, cause they don’t care.
How bout wider lanes too?!
-Cosmo Kramer
https://youtu.be/WPOAQHpkz7I?si=ZavsTw-6V9FVcU1g
Good on this guy!
also: youtube face is so fucking stupid.
This is part of how I paid my way through college. A few things to note:
A few other fun tidbits:
You’ll spend a lot of time with a chalk line.
It was valuable experience for sure, though I sure as hell was not getting $100/hour (It was, ummm… $13-20, in California, albeit 20+ years ago; we got paid to drive and paid a per diem when we slept on site as well).
Great insight. I think there’s a difference here that Colin points out, too – the Labor cost of his jobs, paid to workers, vs. the profit taken by the business
How much can you make if you just speak confidently and pretend to know what you’re doing? Asking for a friend
A lot, for about 5 minutes; after that, zero.
I can be on my way out of there faster than that
“Of course, line marking on city streets is handled by the local department of transport in most jurisdictions.”
Nope, nope, nope. Thermoplastic and urethane pavement striping application is too specialized, so most munis and counties and even states will just farm it out. Munis can even piggyback off of state DOT contract pricing and get a bulk rate.
The most important step is removing the old striping and preparing the surface properly. If that part is botched, the thermo won’t last one single plow event.
Meh, what does it matter – nobody bothers to park in them anymore.
They’re all too important.
Last year the parking lot behind my office was painted. Apparently, they put in too many spaces too close to the loading dock because a week later they painted half of the brand new lines over again with black.
So the “if” was not present in that case.
That’s better than losing parking spaces. Many moons ago worked at a factory that had assigned spaces for all of the paved parking which was close to the building. It took around 3 yrs to get an assigned space, otherwise you parked in the far off gravel lot that turned into a lake when it rained.
They resealed/striped the parking lot and lost around 10 spaces. Pandemonium ensued!!
After we repainted our lot at work, Hyundai corporate mandated that there needs to be a straight line from lot entrance to the Service drive. We retooled and I think lost a couple spots in the process, and you can still see where they had to black over the old lines.
The whole episode was unnecessary to begin with. My building already has a parking lot in front and a two-story garage with more than enough spaces for all the tenants, especially in this era of telecommuting. The back lot seemed perfectly fine unpainted.
Pavement markings turn out to be way more interesting than I ever would have thought. I used to work for a large government transportation agency, and there I learned that the amount of care that goes into something as seemingly simple as paint is almost unreal. We had material scientists who would analyze the paint to ensure the right viscosity and other properties as per our specifications. Pavement marking on the road need to be reflective for safe nighttime driving, and to achieve this agencies usually use tiny spherical glass beads to reflect the vehicle’s headlights. Those beads have to be of a specific size and have to meet specifications for sphericity, and we had materials people who sample and measure those properties too. Getting it right requires *just* the right amount of paint and glass beads, which takes special equipment and constant calibration. And when that $500k+ paint truck is driving down the highway at 30-40mph applying paint, those glass beads will want to spin in the wet paint due to their forward momentum, so engineers came up with a special applicator called a “zero velocity” that kinda puts backspin on the glass beads so they don’t spin as much! Each crew is equipped with a $20k device called a retroreflectomer that measures the retroreflectivity of the paint stripe after it’s been applied to ensure it meets specs. And this was in a northern climate, so nearly every road had to be repainted every year due to the snow plows scraping it off over the winter. I found it absolutely mind-blowing the amount of engineering and attention that goes into that simple stripe on the road.
Paint in general is pretty interesting stuff, but gets mind boggling when you get into really exacting specifications. My mom’s cousin was a paint engineer that worked on development of the coating of the B2 bomber. There were years of testing the proper size, orientation and other factors for the metal components in the paint to make sure it didn’t interfere with the radar pattern, or lack thereof.
I know it gets views and they essentially have to do it, but I absolutely despise the Youtube thumbnail face. I have to fight my urge to not click on some videos purely because of being put off by it.
Put that art degree to WORK!!
Fixed.
That last bit is the key.
I mean, a lot of nurses and teachers might beg to differ
They’re union. They’re doing just fine.
Hey, one thing the US’s expensive health system manages is to make nursing a well-compensated profession – certainly much better than teachers are here.
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
-Albert Einstein
Which is why research scientists make squat I suppose.
Where was this advice on high school career day?
Running your own business is a great way to make real money, the kind you’d never see outside a high paying tech job.
Of course, it’s also a great way to work long hours for peanuts. Success is never guaranteed.
Agree. I was a freelance writer for a few years. The writing part was generally enjoyable, profitable, and straightforward. The hard part of the job was finding more work. Feast or famine.
Plus side to starting a business: you are your own boss, and the profit goes to you.
Minus side: Your boss is a slave-driving asshole who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the losses go to you.
So this dude paid ~$100/hr in labor. I’d like to think that he’s paying his crew as contractors or he only has one or two W2 employees, but something tells me he’s only making all this money by not paying it to someone else.
I suspect it’s like a lot of similar jobs. The laborers don’t get huge money but the business makes a juicy profit
When I lived in the south of England there was a country road which had been painted by a contractor who had been informed that morning that as of the next day his services were no longer required. For years there was the word Slow,in big white letters, then slow, quick quick slow.
Maybe they were trying to teach people how to foxtrot?
I have no idea if he made good money but my cousin had a boyfriend that painted parking lots. The relationship didn’t last but the really sweet basketball court my uncle got painted onto his driveway did.
That’s doooope
And therein lies the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AutlMnahozY
Sorry, but Home Alone Face in video screencap = auto skip of your content.
Agreed. I hate that most of the big YouTubers in the automotive space do it, but they say it really does result in more clicks.
I saw a comparison video once where they uploaded the exact same video and thumbnail except one didn’t include their face and the one with no face got something like 10% of the views of the second, despite having been posted first. It’s annoying, but gets the clicks from younger audiences. Something about there being a human face has been proven to draw in attention significantly more. I do wish it wasn’t such an obnoxious expression though.
The real question is, did the video comparing the with/without home alone face results have the home alone face in its own thumbnail?
Now we are asking the real questions
Scotty Kilmer probably started it. Even if not, let’s just blame him anyway
I really wish the big car youtubers would at least try to be original. They basically have a preset menu they seem to pick from every time.
Reviewing a car: Picture of car with reviewer(s) standing next to it making some sort of gesture toward the car or leaning on the car.
Comparing multiple cars: Reviewer(s) standing in the middle of the cars being compared with his/her hands up in the air. Or if multiple reviewers, perhaps one standing next to each car being compared.
“We tried ___ and had ____ problem!!!!”: Picture of the car and picture of reviewer with their hands on their head, either “home alone” style or perhaps pretending to pull their hair out or rub their head due to the headache that ___ going wrong caused. Or at minimum just them making some fake distressed face.
If you look at the video list for TFL, TST, Hoovies garage etc, they all follow that formula 99% in cases where the lead image has a human.
+100000. It’s one thing if it’s at least appropriate to the context of a video. Like if it’s a topic where it’s even remotely possible/fitting that someone would actually make that face like a typical cookie cutter “I tried _____ watch to see what went wrong!!!” I can kind of try to not hate it because it’s at least plausible that in the context of the situation maybe someone might make that face.
But this one is literally just a mundane “I have a business painting lines and someone paid me the market price to paint some lines for them so I did it” so the like shocked/scared home alone face just seems ridiculously irrelevant and out of place.
It’s funny, because as many people hate it, these thumbs consistently bring in more views