"Everything."

Ask an onsite associate what residents are having delivered to apartment communities these days, and that one word is likely to be their answer.

Over the past half decade, apartment properties have become inundated with packages as consumers' taste for e-commerce has exploded. Onsite team members sometimes must feel as though they do little besides handle package deliveries and their subsequent pick-up by renters. The problem has been exacerbated by inefficient delivery supply chains and the high number of distribution centers.

Just think back to the last time you placed an Amazon order that had multiple items. Did all the items come together in one package or did they come separately? I would venture to guess they came separately. Now expand that out to the number of residents you have at a single community…and there in lays the problem that we will be facing very soon. 

There are many layers that create this significant challenge: more packages are being delivered, there are more carriers, and package sizes are rapidly changing.  Residents purchasing more bulky items – like furniture – that are difficult for communities to keep stored in a leasing office or dedicated package room. Gone are the days when packages consisted largely of manageable rectangular boxes.

A 2018 Reuters article noted "a growing appetite from younger consumers to buy everything from BBQ grills and mattresses to dining room tables online."

Package deliveries are, in every sense of the word, a growing problem, and the time has come for multifamily operators to get sophisticated in how they're managing this issue.

By the Numbers
A dive into data and news reports demonstrates the growing dimensions of the package delivery problem.

According to Statista, retail e-commerce sales totaled $2.3 trillion worldwide in 2017. The number is projected to more than double to $4.9 trillion by 2021.

In the U.S., e-commerce sales accounted for 9 percent of all retail sales in 2017; this figure, which stood at 5.8 percent in 2013, is expected to grow to 12.4 percent next year.

Digging a little deeper, nearly 10 percent of all grocery sales in the U.S. will be made online in 2022, OneSpace forecasts. That's up from 3.5 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, Amazon's furniture sales increased by 33 percent on a year-over-year basis in 2017, and furniture giant IKEA has announced it's focusing less on new brick-and-mortar stores and more on increasing its online sales. This is a major shift for the company as, up until a few years ago, it was hard pressed to find anything IKEA offered online. Their goal was always to bring the consumer into the store experience.

These statistics help to illustrate that packages of every shape and size, even bulky items, are now arriving at apartment communities.

A More Sophisticated Approach
Onsite associates are having to spend too much of their time handling package issues. This takes them away from managing prospects and doing the many other things needed to keep current residents happy.

To help their associates, apartment properties sometimes purchase a locker system or designate a room for package storage but they often don't have a system in place for ensuring that packages are moving in and out of those spaces as quickly as possible. This results in these spaces becoming overcrowded.

Apartment communities need to realize they are now in the logistics business. Through a combination of hardware, software and storage space, they can handle packages of most any size. They can make it easier for residents to receive notifications about their packages and retrieve their packages and for carriers to deliver packages. When communities quicken package throughput, they reduce the need for excessive storage space, even in this day of increased package delivery and increased package size.