Apartments deal with avalanche of Amazon packages
We’ve all heard the mind-numbing statistics about the increases in online shopping – and the related shipping it generates.
Amazon Prime alone boasted earlier this month that it shipped 5 billion packages in 2017. Now add in grocery and meal box deliveries and, well, we’re talking about an avalanche of packages.
Increasingly, that avalanche is burying the management offices of apartment buildings, leaving building owners looking for a way to dig out.
Bloomington-based Doran Cos. thinks it has found an answer.
For about the last three years the prolific apartment developer has been adding an automated locker system to its new projects, including The Moline, a 239-unit building in Hopkins.
And yes, these are high-tech versions of the lockers once found in bus and train stations before security concerns banished them.
“We have a system called Package Concierge,” said Tony Kuechle, senior vice president of development for Doran. “Any of our vendors can use it.”
A delivery person puts a package in a locker and shuts it. The locker locks and generates an access code that is texted to the recipient. When the recipient uses the code, the door pops open. No more paper slips stuck to walls or piles of packages spilling across the floor.
Not surprisingly, other vendors have jumped in the game. They include Parcel Pending, Luxer One, and of course, Amazon, which has started pitching its Amazon Hub locker system. “They don’t take up a ton of space,” Kuechle said. There is a steep initial cost, however, as much as $30,000 for one building.
The issues are more complicated for existing buildings and their owners.
The Cliffs of Minnetonka, which opened in 1985, has 456 apartments in six buildings and an office with a small package storage room that worked just fine for the first three decades. Gradually, however, stacks of packages have lined the hallway outside the storage room. In the last weeks before Christmas, building entries were papered with delivery notices and management resorted to posters in elevators reminding people to pick up their packages as soon as possible.
Kyle Belgarde, who manages the property, said the problem has grown significantly in the past three years.
“What became a real struggle was the increase in Amazon Prime packages,” he said. “Some packages have been left in building entries. I’ve come to the office and there have been piles of boxes outside the office door.”
On an average Monday or Tuesday – the busiest days of the week — the complex might receive 50 to 75 boxes.
“On the days before Christmas we had 100 to 150 packages a day,” he said. “It took a full-time employee to keep on top of it.”
Belgarde is considering lockers, but doesn’t have room in his office. He’s also thinking about converting some space in the property’s community building to add lockers.
Some apartment owners have come up with their own solutions.
“I am a huge investor in Amazon,” said veteran apartment owner Jim Soderberg, president of Brooklyn Center-based Soderberg Apartment Associates.
“I see this as just the beginning,” he said of this year’s record deliveries. “I think in the next few years, the number will double.”
Soderberg saw his chance to test a new system when he bought the 700-unit Crossroads at Penn apartment complex in Richfield in 2015 and converted it to The Concierge. As the name implies, the property has staked its reputation on the amenities it offers.
When the complex received 125 to 150 packages on the busiest delivery days after Thanksgiving, he was ready, with a 200-square-foot storage room.
“We super-oversized the space right out of the gate,” Soderberg said. He also created cold storage space for flowers and medicines. And, he has a second room available for the inevitable growth he sees in the future. Soderberg said he spent extra time developing a numbering system for buildings and apartments to simplify sorting packages and finding them.
Soderberg has looked at automated systems, but he already has the office staffed from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
“It’s a lot cheaper for me to cover my full-time concierge people for the year,” he said.
Changing a single property is one thing. Changing a national company with a diverse portfolio of 29,000 apartments in 214 properties across the country takes creativity.
“It’s astounding the changes I’ve seen over the years,” said Janet Anderson, vice president of operations for Plymouth-based Dominium.
“I had a property in Eden Prairie where that was part of our service, delivering packages,” she said. “We just couldn’t keep up with the packages. It went through the roof.”
The company now is building storage rooms with security cameras in new properties and adding them to existing properties whenever possible. Drivers and tenants pick up a key fob, basically an automated keyless entry device, at the office and return it when they’re done. The process is based on the honor system – with a back-up.
“There are occasional issues with theft, which is why we use cameras,” she said.
The Twin Cities prizes classic brownstone apartments, which pose their own problems.
Laura and Jim Rubin, owners of Minneapolis-based Mint Properties LLC, manage 1,260 apartment units in 74 small, older buildings without on-site management or room for storing packages.
“We have buildings all over,” Laura Rubin said. Residents can have packages delivered to the company’s main office and pick them up there but most have packages delivered to them at work instead, she said. Some neighbors arrange to accept packages for one another.
The reality is that deliveries to apartments are a matter of common sense, just as they are for homeowners, Rubin said.
“I would never have a laptop delivered to my house,” she said.
The Rubins haven’t felt pressure from residents to change the system.
“It’s not expected,” she said. “We don’t have a swimming pool; we don’t have a community room.”
Rubin’s tenants now have a solution.
Amazon Hub is a companion to Amazon Locker, a system that can be installed in grocery stores and other public locations. It has installed the system in 20 locations throughout the Twin Cities, including some Cub Foods stores and Whole Foods Market locations.
Whole Foods is now owned by Amazon.
Of course.
Source: finance-commerce.com
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