Apartment communities across the country often are overwhelmed with the problems presented by package delivery and management.

During the 2019 holiday season, many of them surely felt especially stressed.

According to Mastercard SpendingPulse, overall holiday retail sales in the U.S. increased by 3.4 percent when compared to 2018. More importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, online sales grew by 18.8 percent during the recent holiday season when compared with one year earlier.

“E-commerce sales hit a record high this year with more people doing their holiday shopping online,” said Steve Sadove, senior advisor for Mastercard and former CEO and chairman of Saks Inc., in a statement.

Meanwhile, Amazon announced it enjoyed a “record-breaking” holiday season, in which “billions of items were ordered worldwide.”

According to the online retail giant, “more people tried Prime this holiday season than any previous year – in fact, in one week alone, more than 5 million new customers started Prime free trials or began paid memberships worldwide.”

To help handle the holiday crunch, Amazon hired more than 250,000 full- and part-time seasonal workers. Overall, the company says its last-mile delivery network delivered more 3.5 billion packages across the globe in 2019.

The craziness didn’t end with the passage of Christmas. In the final days of 2019, UPS announced it expected to handle 1.9 million return packages on National Returns Day (Jan. 2). That figure would represent a 26 percent increase from one year earlier and would set an all-time record for the carrier. And that, of course, doesn’t even include the returns processed by the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx and Amazon.

Be Prepared

The holidays may be the most hectic period when it comes to package deliveries at apartment communities, but operators need to realize there will always be a steady stream of parcels arriving at their properties.

According to eMarketer, global e-commerce retail sales totaled $1.3 trillion in 2014 and are expected to reach $4.9 trillion in 2021. That’s an increase of 265 percent.

In this day and age, leasing associates clearly are no longer able to handle packages on their own. Parcels are just arriving too frequently. Dealing with couriers and finding places to store packages is too disruptive to onsite teams.

But merely adding a set of package lockers isn’t likely to effectively address the problem either.

Forward-thinking operators are realizing the benefits of a package-management system that combines logistics software, hardware and people to move parcels in and out of a storage space as quickly as possible. The combination of these tools creates a system in which disruptions to leasing associates are minimized, residents get the seamless pick-up experience they want and communities don’t have to devote too much space to package storage.

Looking at the trends, it’s clear that package deliveries are only going to continue to increase. And that means apartment operators will need a sophisticated, multi-pronged approach to managing this growing issue.