Ready or Not – Here Come the Holidays (and a Flood of Package Deliveries)

Ask an onsite associate about package management, and you’re likely to see them break into a cold sweat. They might start rocking back and forth and mumbling to themselves.

I’m joking, of course, but there’s no denying how burdensome handling residents’ package deliveries can be for apartment communities. These days, parcels are arriving seven days a week, and they come in all shapes and sizes. And online retailers often aren’t exactly models of efficiency: surely you’ve placed an online order only to watch each of the purchased items – no matter how small – arrive in their own individual box.

Stats provide powerful testimony to the scope of the problem that today’s multifamily properties face.

For instance, total e-commerce sales in the U.S. totaled $513.6 billion in 2018, according to the Commerce Department. That represents an increase of 14.2 percent from 2017.

Also consider the fact that, in 2019, global sales for Amazon Prime Day – an event so hyped and anticipated it seems as though it’s become another national holiday – reached $7.2 billion, according to an Internet Retailer estimate. That’s a 71 percent increase from the preceding year.

Well, here’s some sobering news for apartment communities: the holidays are coming – and that means package management is certain to be more chaotic than ever.

The Holiday Forecast

Online retail sales in the U.S. are expected to reach $143.7 billion during November and December, an increase of 14.1 percent from the same two months in 2017, according to Adobe Analytics. Cyber Monday itself is projected to see $9.4 billion in online sales, which would be a spike of nearly 19 percent from 2018.

In light of the extra-busy holiday shopping season, UPS has announced it is hiring approximately 100,000 temporary workers.  

"We expect another record peak season this year, with daily package deliveries nearly doubling [emphasis added] compared to our average of 20 million per day," said Jim Barber, chief operating officer at UPS, in a statement accompanying the announcement. 

Add it all up, and the holidays are bound to really bring home the point that apartment communities can’t afford to not have their package-management act together.

Forging a Solution

So what does all this mean? Clearly, the package management problem is growing in size and complexity. And apartment communities will need a multi-pronged approach.

Leasing associates by themselves are no longer able to handle the issue, and even a set of package lockers is bound to leave a community ill-equipped to deal with the hourly deluge of parcels.

This has become a logistics issue, and apartment communities need to recognize it as such. They answer is not for associates to devote more time of their busy days to handling packages or for communities to carve out more storage space to store the ever-increasing number of deliveries, or even to require residents to get their packages off-site. 

No, the solution lies in a system that incorporates software, hardware and people to move packages in and out of a storage space as efficiently as possible. By using this variety of tools, apartment communities will be able to minimize the disruptions to leasing associates, give residents the pick-up experience they demand and not have to allocate too much space to parcel storage.