Camden Property Trust takes a tough stand and stops accepting package deliveries
WSJ – The biggest landlords in the U.S. are being crushed under a mountain of packages, leading one large apartment operator to stop accepting deliveries and others to experiment with ways to minimize the clutter.
The moves are at the center of two colliding trends: an increase in apartment living and a surge in online shopping. The result is a rising tide of packages with no good place to go.
U.S. online retail sales are expected to swell to $334 billion in 2015, up from $263 billion in 2013, according to Forrester Research Inc., a research and advisory firm. Analysts at Forrester expect that number to increase to $480 billion in 2019.
The onslaught has turned management offices of apartment buildings into de facto receiving centers as landlords grapple with recording packages, tracking tenants down to pick them up and finding places to store the parcels. Read more at WSJ – Read USPS News Link article below
Package pile-up
Apartment landlords dealing with delivery surge
The rise in online shopping has produced big shipping increases for the Postal Service and its competitors, but not everyone welcomes the delivery surge.
Many apartment landlords are being swamped with packages. Some say they’re spending too much time sorting deliveries and running out of storage space.
Camden Property Trust, the nation’s 14th-largest apartment operator, has stopped accepting parcels at its 169 properties across the nation. Executives say each package means 10 minutes of lost productivity for its workers, costing the company more than $3 million a year.
“Ultimately, this was going to eat our lunch,” Keith Oden, Camden’s president, told The Wall Street Journal last week.
Other property managers are taking different approaches.
Avalon Bay Communities Inc. has experimented with installing package lockers — similar to the gopost lockers that USPS operates — while Equity Residential has mandated height and weight restrictions for packages.
Other buildings are turning janitors’ closets into package rooms.
Residents aren’t interested in reducing their deliveries.
“Package delivery is almost a basic amenity. It’s almost like they just told us that they’re going to stop doing maintenance,” Braden Christian, a Camden Property resident in Houston, told the Journal.