As of July 2019, Northeastern’s  Boston campus parking system will be managed by Queensland Investment Corporation, or QIC. Northeastern announced the 50-year agreement with the Australian investment firm Jan. 28 in an email sent to faculty and staff as well as student parking permit holders from Thomas Nedell, senior vice president for finance and treasurer.

“Northeastern does not want to be in the business of parking,” Northeastern professor of finance Eliot Sherman said. “If someone is better at managing parking, the university would rather let them do that.”

Sherman said that basic business principles state that the university should delegate services like parking to another company if that company can perform the service even slightly better. This explains why Northeastern has relinquished the management of its dining services to Chartwells and its bookstore to Barnes and Noble.

According to the email, Northeastern will receive an unspecified “upfront capital commitment from QIC that will allow Northeastern to make substantial new investments in the university’s core mission.” In other words, QIC will pay Northeastern to manage its parking facilities. In turn, Northeastern can use QIC’s initial payment to grow its endowment and advance its academic goals.

Both QIC and Nedell declined to comment on the announcement.

While hundreds of universities have transferred management of their bookstores and dining services to external corporations, parking facilities have not followed this trend. NU is the first private university in the country to sign this type of agreement, according to the press release. Northeastern is preceded only by Ohio State University, a public university that signed a similar deal with QIC in 2013.

Sherman said this difference may be due to the lack of parking complexity compared to dining and bookstore management.

“Managing the parking facilities is easier and less onerous for the university,” Sherman said. “Whereas a large proportion of students come into contact with campus food services and Northeastern merchandise, a smaller subset of students, faculty and staff utilize the parking facilities.”

In addition to its upfront payment, QIC also said in a press release that it will continue to invest in Northeastern’s parking infrastructure in the future by funding “major technology upgrades and integrating mobile technologies into its services.”

While this aspect of the deal remains vague, the most concrete promises relate to price. According to Nedell’s email, “Beginning in 2019-2020, annual rate increases will be tempered from what [NU has] experienced and the maximum annual increase will decline every year for the next decade.”

After 2028, price increases will cap at four percent per year, Nedell said. For the 2018-19 school year, parking prices increased by about nine percent for undergraduate day passes as well as faculty and staff passes.

OSU’s deal provides a test case for what Northeastern can expect from this new deal moving forward. According to the Lantern, OSU’s student newspaper, parking rates “regularly met, or in some instances exceeded, the 5.5 percent annual increase initially agreed to.”

While parking prices have increased at OSU, according to a press release from QIC, QIC has “invested more than $24 million in major facility repair projects [at OSU] to ensure that the parking system will be maintained and optimized over a 50-year period.”

If Northeastern’s deal is anything like OSU’s, the university community can expect continued — but now stabilized — rate increases from year to year.

For now, parking is an infrequently debated topic compared with other services at Northeastern.

Second-year business and communications major Caitlyn Ortutay parks in an on-campus garage. “I don’t really have any problems with the parking here,” she said.

However, as parking prices rise, more students may leave their cars at home or in cheaper garages.

Some students like Laura Hines, a second-year biology major, feel unaffected by the parking changes. “There’s no reason to have a car in the city,” she said, since she is still taking classes on campus.

However, she recognized that this is not the case for all students. “Some people do need parking for co-op and Northeastern should make that affordable,” Hines said.

Editor’s note: Eliot Sherman is on The News’ board of directors.